This game of musical beds is taking its toll on today’s new parents, with 30 per cent getting less sleep than their parents did, a survey has found.

An over-reliance on electronic baby monitors, which send worried parents scurrying to infants at the slightest whimper, and a reluctance to put newborns in cots or leave them to cry is to blame. So, too, is the desperation for a good night’s sleep among working mothers, whose babies, sensing this parental anxiety, decide to stay awake all night instead.

The average new mother today gets 3½ hours’ sleep a night, compared with the five hours that their mothers did.

It also takes parents today an average of 56 minutes to get baby to sleep in the evening, double the time that it took their own mothers, according to the survey of 2,000 new parents aged 29 to 32 and 2,000 grandmothers aged 55 to 65 conducted jointly by the magazines Mother & Baby and Yours.

Differences in parenting styles appear to be responsible, at least in part. Mothers today are most likely to “breast or bottle-feed baby until he falls asleep” or “cuddle baby to sleep”, whereas mothers in the 1960s and 1970s were most likely to “just put baby in the cot”.

Seven in ten mothers today regularly take their baby into the marital bed, yet in the 1960s and 1970s three quarters of mothers never allowed this.

More than half of all new fathers now get up in the night to tend to the baby, whereas 71 per cent of men in the 1960s and 1970s never did.

Elena Dalrymple, the editor of Mother & Baby, said: “Mums today are advised to have baby in a cot in their room for the first six months — and many stay much longer than this — which means that they react to every slight whimper.”

Technology also plays a huge part, Ms Dalrymple said. “Babies can sometimes resettle themselves in a few minutes, but the arrival of mum or dad within seconds of a snuffle on the baby monitor means the child never really gets the chance to do this,” she said.

The fact that many women now have to combine motherhood with paid employment was also affecting sleep patterns, Ms Dalrymple added.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most mothers did not work and therefore were not so anxious about getting baby to bed.

The survey found that sleep starvation was leaving many parents struggling with exhaustion. Two thirds of parents said that it had made them impatient with each other and one fifth said that it made them irritable with their child. Most also said that it had impaired their ability to work. To help to resolve this, Mother & Baby magazine suggests that parents use the “controlled crying” method of sleep training once their infant is six months old. Six out of ten parents said that it worked within four nights.

Andrea Grace, a health visitor and sleep expert, said that to make controlled crying work, parents needed to establish a good bedtime routine. “When baby starts to cry, mum or dad should go into the room, use soothing words, stroke baby’s face or give them a kiss, but don’t pick baby up. Then leave the room and wait a few minutes longer before going back in again and so on.”

For Claire Hall, 32, the mother of seven-week-old Lucian, sleep training cannot come too soon. Her son is waking twice a night and never allows her to get more than 3½ hours’ sleep at a stretch. “It’s worse if I use the baby monitor. I find myself jumping up at every little noise he makes. Lucian doesn’t go to bed until around 11.30pm, so my husband and I don’t get an evening to ourselves. Then he will wake at least twice in the night,” Mrs Hall, a project manager for a marketing agency, said.

It is not all bad. Her husband, Justin, an accounts manager, sleeps through all the noise.

BABY BLUES

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