Employers increasingly recognise the importance of supporting the wellbeing of their teams, but could they be overlooking one of the biggest contributors to poor sleep?
When we think about employee wellbeing, we often focus on supporting adults to sleep better. We encourage healthy bedtime routines, mindfulness, exercise and reducing stress because we know that well-rested employees are happier, healthier and better able to perform at their best.
But there is one area that is rarely talked about. Children’s sleep.
Before becoming a baby, toddler and child sleep consultant, and when my children were young, I spent many years working as a paediatric nurse at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Long shifts were demanding at the best of times, but like so many working parents, there were periods when I was working 12½-hour shifts after being awake several times during the night with my own children.
As a mum of three, a business owner and a sleep consultant, I can look back and recognise just how much those broken nights affected every part of life.
Like so many parents, I simply accepted that feeling exhausted was part of the job.
It’s not just the newborn stage
When people think about parental sleep deprivation, they often picture the first few weeks with a newborn baby.
Of course, those early weeks can be incredibly tiring, but sleep disruption does not always end once the newborn stage has passed. For many families, the challenges simply change.
They may be dealing with:
- a toddler waking several times every night
- a preschooler who struggles to settle without a parent beside them
- a child who regularly wakes very early
- repeated calls for a parent throughout the night
- bedtime battles that leave everyone emotionally exhausted
For some families, these difficulties continue for months or even years.
This is not a problem affecting just a small number of families. NHS England reported that, in 2023, 37.8% of children aged 8 to 16 experienced a sleep problem three or more times during the previous seven nights. While this figure relates to older children rather than babies and toddlers, it helps to demonstrate that disrupted family sleep is certainly not limited to the newborn stage.
By the time a parent arrives at work, they may already have been awake several times during the night, started their day very early and managed their child’s needs for hours before the working day has even begun.
The hidden impact on your workforce
Most of us know we do not feel our best after a poor night’s sleep. However, when interrupted sleep becomes the norm, the effects can be much greater than simply feeling tired.
Insufficient sleep can affect:
- concentration
- memory
- decision-making
- reaction times
- mood and emotional regulation
- our ability to cope with everyday pressure
For working parents, these are not simply facts from a research paper. They can become part of everyday life.
Many of the parents I support tell me they:
- struggle to concentrate during meetings
- forget simple tasks
- find making decisions more difficult
- feel less patient with colleagues and family
- lose confidence in themselves
- rely on caffeine or sugary snacks to get through the afternoon
- feel guilty because they know they are not performing at their best
These are not necessarily signs of someone who lacks motivation or commitment. They may be signs of someone who simply has not had the opportunity to get the sleep their body needs.
The cost of poor sleep at work
The wider impact of insufficient sleep on the workplace has been well researched. Whilst these statistics relate to sleep deprivation in general rather than children’s sleep specifically, they highlight the effect poor sleep can have on workplace productivity, performance and the number of working days lost each year. It is reasonable to assume that children’s sleep difficulties contribute to this picture for many working parents.
Research from RAND estimated that insufficient sleep results in the loss of over 200,000 working days each year across the UK.
It’s about more than productivity
Productivity may be the most obvious concern for an employer, but sleep is also an important part of longer-term health and wellbeing.
Good sleep supports our mood, memory, concentration and ability to manage stress. Persistent insufficient sleep has also been associated with an increased risk of health problems, including high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Sleep is, of course, only one part of a person’s overall health. However, it is one that is often overlooked until someone begins to struggle. Supporting sleep is therefore not simply about helping employees complete more work. It is about supporting their health, confidence and wellbeing too.
There’s only so much parents can do
Many workplace wellbeing programmes rightly encourage staff to improve their own sleep through healthy sleep habits and good sleep hygiene. However, when a child is waking repeatedly overnight, there is only so much an adult can do to protect their own sleep.
Parents will quite rightly respond when their child needs them, and the difficulty comes when a child has developed a pattern in which they need the same support each time they move between sleep cycles. They may need a parent to lie beside them, rock them, repeatedly return to their room or help them back to sleep several times each night.
What we can do is help families understand what is happening and, where it is developmentally appropriate, help their child learn the skills they need to settle and return to sleep with less parental support.
Sometimes the missing part of the conversation is not simply helping the adult improve their own bedtime routine. It is helping the child sleep more confidently too.
How Little Dreams Solihull, Birmingham and South Warwickshire can help
At Little Dreams Solihull, Birmingham and South Warwickshire, I support families with children from newborn through to school age using gentle, responsive and evidence-based approaches.
Alongside one-to-one family support, I work with employers who want to better support the parents within their teams.
Support can include:
- sleep discussions and workshops prior to babies arrival
- workplace sleep and wellbeing seminars
- lunch-and-learn sessions
- parent webinars
- employee sleep clinics
- individual support for employees whose children are struggling with sleep
These sessions help employers understand how children’s sleep can affect family and employee wellbeing, while giving parents realistic, practical advice they can take away and use at home.
This is not about promising that every child will suddenly sleep through the night; it is about helping parents understand their child’s sleep, recognise what may be contributing to any difficulties and make gentle, appropriate changes that support the whole family.
If you’d like to explore how Little Dreams could support the working parents within your organisation, I’d be delighted to have a conversation.
You can find out more about our corporate seminars here:
References
NHS England – Mental Health of Children and Young People in England (2023): Sleep
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2023-wave-4-follow-up/part-2-sleep-loneliness-activities-and-health-behaviours
RAND Europe – Why Sleep Matters: The Economic Costs of Insufficient Sleep
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2016/11/30/index1.html
Full RAND Europe Research Report
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1791.html
NHS Every Mind Matters – How to fall asleep faster and sleep better
https://www.nhs.uk/every-mind-matters/mental-wellbeing-tips/how-to-fall-asleep-faster-and-sleep-better/
