When babies and infants cry at night, mothers wake up much more often than fathers: but It is really because the paternal ears are deaf to the cores? According to a study published on Emotionno: the fathers feel very well, but to get out of bed to look after the children are (almost) always the mothers. More than a biological question, the disparity in the night care of the children between mothers and fathers would therefore depend on social factors. Let’s try to understand which one.
Crying and alarm clocks. The researchers conducted three different studies to understand how men and women respond to the crying of their children, and those who take care of consoling them most of the time. In the first, which involved 140 people without children, participants were asked to sleep at their home with a smartphone that reproduced the cry of a newborn or the typical sound of an alarm clock at several volumes. In this case, The women were slightly more sensitive to the sounds reproduced with low volume (between 33 and 44 dB – To have a comparison, a whisper is normally at 30 dB, the cry of a child also reaches 90 dB), waking up 14% more than men. When the volume increased, the differences between the sexes were practically zero.
Three times more. The second study involved 117 couples of Danish parents, each of whom reported daily for a week how many times he woke up at night to look after his son. From the results it emerged that The women woke up three times more than menthat only in 1% of the couples was the father who raised the mother more often, and that in less than one couple out of four the night care of the son was divided equally.
It is not hearing fault. To understand if the minimum differences highlighted in the first study could explain the great differences found in the second, the researchers conducted a third test: 500 computer simulations in which as many virtual couples, “shaped” with the data collected in the first study, woke up feeling the crying of the children.
Women dealt with children 57% of the timeslightly more than men – a percentage very different from the data collected in the second study, where women got up in 76% of cases.
I (possible) reasons. “Our mathematical model has shown that the big difference in the night care of the children cannot be explained by the small differences that we have observed in the sensitivity to the sound between men and women”, explains the coordinator of the Arnault Quentin-Vermitle studio.
The factors would therefore be non -biological, but social: the fact that women enter maternity generally before men (in Italy it would be worse, since the fathers enjoy just 10 days of paternity, against the 32 weeks that can be divided at will between mom and dad in Denmark), that this allows mothers to learn before fathers to console their children and finally (detail not to be underestimated) the fact that, If the child is breastfed in the breastmakes more sense that the mother gets up.
