Mom’s Mood, Baby’s Sleep: What’s the Connection?

If there’s one thing that everyone knows about newborn babies, it’s that they don’t sleep through the night, and neither do their parents. But in fact, those first six months of life are crucial to developing the regular sleeping and waking patterns, known as circadian rhythms, that a child will need for a healthy future.

Some children may start life with the sleep odds stacked against them, though, say University of Michigan sleep experts who study the issue. They will present data from their study next week at the European Sleep Research Society meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

Babies whose mothers experienced depression any time before they became pregnant, or developed mood problems while they were pregnant, are much more prone to having chaotic sleep patterns in the first half-year of life than babies born to non-depressed moms, the team has found.

For instance, infants born to depressed moms nap more during the day, take much longer to settle down to sleep at night, and wake up more often during the night. It’s a baby form of the insomnia that millions of adults know all too well.

Not only does this add to parents’ sleepless nights, but it may help set these children up for their own depression later in life.

But this doesn’t mean that babies born to depressed moms are doomed to follow in their mothers’ shoes, even though depression does tend to run in families, says Roseanne Armitage, Ph.D., the leader of the U-M Sleep & Chronophysiology Laboratory team at the U-M Depression Center.

Nor does it mean that parents who haven’t suffered depression can ignore the importance of their babies’ sleep.

Rather, it means that all parents – especially ones with a history of depression – must pay close attention to the conditions they create for their infant’s sleep, from birth.

“Keeping a very regular sleep schedule is incredibly important,” says Armitage. “We know that for both children and adults, and from this study we now know that for infants, the more stable the bedtime the less chaotic sleep is during the night.”

Armitage and her team have devoted years to studying the links between sleep and depression, and the circadian rhythms, light-dark exposure, and other factors that appear to make a difference in sleep and mood. Over the past decade, they’ve shown that all are strongly linked.

Recently, their research in depressed adults, teenagers and pre-teens led them to wonder if the links were as strong among babies. Infants need a lot more sleep than grownups, but tend to get it in shorter chunks of time throughout the day and night, at least for the first months of life.

The research that Armitage and her colleagues will present next week, and also this fall at the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry annual meeting, is based on sleep studies involving two groups of new mothers and their babies. It’s funded by the Cohen Sleep Research Fund and the Drs. Jack and Barbara Berman Depression Research Fund at the U-M Depression Center.