The Surprising Reason Parents Aren't Sleeping (It's Not Just the Baby)

As parents, we know the exhaustion is real, but have you ever stayed up way past your own bedtime, not because of your baby, but because you needed a little time to yourself?

You're not alone, and now there's research to prove it.

Here at Nanit, we're committed to understanding the full picture of family sleep and that includes parental sleep. Our Nanit Lab team partnered with researchers at Sungshin Women's University to investigate a surprisingly common but understudied behavior: bedtime procrastination in parents.

Our recent study, conducted with two independent samples totaling over 500 parents of infants and toddlers, examined how often parents voluntarily delay their own sleep, and what's driving it. This paper was published in Sleep Medicine Research.

Access the full article here.

What Is Bedtime Procrastination?

Bedtime procrastination (BP) is the voluntary delay of sleep when there's nothing actually stopping you from going to bed. It's that moment when you know you should go to sleep, but you keep scrolling anyway. While it's been studied in college students and young adults, its prevalence among parents, a group already running on limited sleep, had never been closely examined. Until now.

The Findings: Parents are staying up later than they need to

The results are striking:

• It's nearly universal: In a sample of 94 Korean parents tracked nightly over six weeks, parents engaged in bedtime procrastination on 78.6% of nights. On nights when bedtime procrastination occurred, delays exceeded 40 minutes in 61.5% of cases, and the average delay was just over an hour. 

• It's not just about the baby: In a second sample of 483 U.S. Nanit parents, the top predictors of bedtime procrastination were smartphone use, lack of personal leisure time, and feelings of minimal daily reward, not just child sleep disruptions.

• Child bedtime matters too: Later child lights-out time was associated with a greater likelihood of parents being classified in the high bedtime procrastination group, suggesting that family sleep schedules are closely intertwined.

• Mental health is part of the picture: Parents with higher bedtime procrastination also reported more postnatal depression symptoms and greater difficulties with emotion regulation, including patterns related to emotional awareness.

The Nanit Takeaway: Parental Sleep Is a Two-Way Street

This research reframes how we think about parental sleep loss. Yes, nighttime caregiving is demanding and often unavoidable. But a meaningful portion of parental sleep deprivation may be self-driven, a quiet act of reclaiming personal time after a long day of caregiving.

The late-night hours often feel like the only time that truly belongs to you. But consistently cutting into your sleep to get that "me time" can take a real toll on your mental health, your parenting, and your ability to show up for your family.

For Nanit parents, this is a reminder to look at the whole family's sleep, yours included.

Use Nanit Insights to build a consistent bedtime routine for your little one, and consider what your wind-down routine looks like too. Small shifts like setting a phone-down time or creating a short personal ritual before bed can help you get the rest you genuinely deserve.