A January Huffington Post article reported on a recent study that showed that 43.5 percent of single mothers get fewer than seven hours of sleep, and 52 percent wake up feeling unrested. Kristi Williams, sociologist and senior scholar for the Council on Contemporary Families raised some good questions for HuffPo readers. In the reporter’s words, Williams noted that “the study doesn’t actually show whether single parenthood causes sleep problems. Because single parenthood is also concentrated among poor and racial minority groups, it’s hard to tell whether being a single parent, being poor or being part of a certain minority group is a stronger factor in poor sleep and poor health.” Williams put it succinctly: “Family policy is health policy.”

While there are varying levels of severity, such that single mothers tend to sleep less and have lower sleep quality than single fathers, and both tend to sleep less and have lower sleep quality than men and women in two-parent households, the unhealthy sleep patterns of single mothers are likely a particularly concerning consequence of a wider pattern of outdated family policies in the United States. After all, even in two-parent families, 32.7 percent of parents did not get enough sleep, and 42.2 percent did not wake up feeling well rested.“Family policy is health policy.” —Kristi Williams

Along similar lines, in November, Stephanie Coontz talked on Wisconsin Public Radio about the stress gap among working parents. She said that in the United States, parents have “greater stresses… and greater levels of work-family conflict than any other country in the Western world.” Other developed countries have made strides in family policy, providing affordable quality childcare and paid family leave, and addressing unemployment and overwork in order to accommodate demographic changes. But Coontz, CCF Director of Research and Public Education, says that in the United States, family policies have remained largely unchanged since they were developed in the 1950s, an “aberrant time when the largest number of kids ever were being raised by a stay-at-home mom and a full-time working father who could count on keeping his job in a way that people can’t today.” Since, according to Coontz, “70 percent of kids have every parent in the household involved in the labor force,” a modernization of our work and family policies might be a particularly effective strategy for improving the health of the almost 50 percent of single moms, as well as the 32 percent of parents in two-parent households, who don’t get enough sleep.