Association between breastfeeding and new mothers’ sleep: a unique Australian time use study

Table 3 Maternal weekly hours spent in unpaid childcare, personal care and free time activities, detailed feeding groups^(a)

a. Maternal weekly hours spent in activity, by detailed feeding group (for all target infant ages)
Activity/Breastfeeding status	A. Breastfed only (obs = 95)	B. Formula only (obs = 5)	C. Breastfed & formula fed (obs = 3)	D. Breastfed & solids (obs = 185)	E. Formula fed & solids (obs = 22)	F. Breastfed & formula fed & solids (obs = 17)	p-value
Necessary time
Sleep, adult meals and other personal care time	58.46	66.24	62.93	66.08	67.70	68.91	.024
Sleep	49.56	58.38	56.54	57.03	60.25	59.04	.004
Committed time
Childcare	49.48	38.79	41.43	47.60	38.09	43.31	.060
Sleeplessness	3.24	1.51	7.24	3.59	1.71	3.17	.222
Free time	20.66	19.87	21.10	18.99	22.01	17.01	.719
Night-time parenting (sleep plus sleeplessness)	54.45	60.72	64.56	61.91	63.30	63.92	.008
b. Maternal weekly hours spent in activity, by age of target infant (for detailed feeding group)
Activity	Age of target infant (months)				p-value
Activity	3 (obs = 86)	6 (obs = 134)		9 (obs = 107)	p-value
Necessary time
Sleep, adult meals and other personal care time	69.44	64.32		61.43	.006
Maternal sleep	60.87	55.98		53.52	.006
Committed time
Childcare	45.30	42.85		40.95	.239
Sleeplessness	3.94	2.95		2.72	.510
Free time	19.64	19.30		20.80	.445
Night-time parenting (sleep plus sleeplessness)	66.60	52.85		49.90	.002

^(a) Back- transformed means from residual maximum likelihood analysis, using linear mixed model. Note the back-transformed means will be similar, but not be the same as the predicted means for the original data due to the square root transformation and the unbalanced nature of the data. See supplementary table for predicted means and average standard error of difference

ISSN: 1746-4358