A sideways look at economics
At night, as I ponder the issues that concern me most, from climate breakdown to the substrate that will work best in my new fish tank, my thoughts are interrupted by the piercing silence of no crying baby. This, I believe, is the result of the sleep training routine I recently introduced for my eleven-month-old son, courtesy of my colleague Laura. Sleep training is a highly charged subject, as any parent who has considered or implemented it will know. And there is a bandwagon of self-proclaimed gurus who claim to be able to advise you how to do this and a whole host of other things to help raise a happy little child. I suspect most of this is preying on the desperation and bad judgement of tired parents, although I am becoming a convert to kiddie sleep training — which naturally got me wondering about its economic benefits.
If you believe that sleep training works and achieves results, you could argue that the value is infinite. After all, tears avoided and a good night’s sleep for parents and baby, over and over, is surely priceless. Maybe not as valuable as the air we breathe or water we drink, without which we would die. Or wine, without which we would come close. But the value is high whatever way you look at it. This is a handy reminder that not everything that is important has a monetary value or is reflected in statistics like GDP. For example, the air is free, a bottle of water costs about £1 and a decent bottle of wine starts at around £20, even though their value is infinite.
As family structures and childcare arrangements change, working parents are increasingly looking for solutions to their baby-sleeping problems. Some estimates put annual sales in the global ‘sleep market’ at more than $60 billion[1] in 2023, with the market in ‘baby products’ (including cribs that self-rock when they sense a baby moving, to put them back to sleep) topping £300 billion.[2] The gross value added of these sectors (and their direct contribution to GDP) is likely to be a lot smaller once the cost of raw material inputs is netted out.
But what really motivates me as an economist is not so much to work out something’s direct contribution to GDP, but the broader value that things have in this world: whether they are a good use of resources and enhance things like wellbeing and productivity. Self-help gimmicks and useless gear will do nothing for this; but techniques that work, like sleep training is promising to do, could have a big, positive, indirect contribution to GDP.
The health benefits of getting enough sleep are well documented. Having a baby seriously compromises that. Having a baby that sleeps better compromises that less, with better outcomes for the health of the parents and baby’s development. Not only could this put less of a burden on the public finances to treat illnesses, it will help the parent (and perhaps in future the baby) to be more productive at work, and to have more time for leisure — or indeed to pursue other economic activities. It may be hard to quantify these things, but this would clearly be good for the economy.
From my early experience, successful sleep training adds about one more hour to my day that I can use as I please (leisure, work or sleep – probably a combination of all three!); and it will save my wife the same, perhaps even more, when she gets back from her trip abroad for her grandmother’s 90th birthday. That would be two hours per night, for the next, let’s say, two years — possibly more. That’s 730 nights, and 1460 adult hours, not to mention a better-rested baby. How much is that worth?
This isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk argument. Most, but not all, forms of sleep training require letting the child experience some emotional discomfort, and tears, for some period of time. How long that lasts, and how long they take to adjust to not being picked up or immediately attended to when crying during the night, will vary by baby. Essentially, sleep training puts baby on cold turkey so that they learn how to soothe themselves. Since not all children will respond to this in the same way, the benefits, or otherwise, will be different depending on parent and baby. But if it was to work for all the parents of the nearly 700,000 babies born in the UK each year,[3] that equates to a massive 1.022 billion hours that could be spent sleeping or doing more fun things. What is the economic value of that?!
A parent’s biggest fear is that they are hurting their child by letting them cry, even for a short while, and that it will leave some sort of emotional scar, which could have negative consequences later in life. And if the sleep training doesn’t work, you’ve caused a lot of unnecessary stress for all involved. My wife and I had those fears. But now that we have two kids and we’ve seen that the world doesn’t end if one kid gets ignored a little bit while you sort out the other one, we have become more comfortable with the idea of a little crying for the greater good.
Reading Cribsheet, a book by Emily Oster, an economist, also made me more comfortable with the idea of sleep training. In the book she debunks a range of studies with flawed econometrics, which make incorrect conclusions regarding things like the drawbacks of sleep training. Talking to other parents who have done it and found it works helped a lot too. Finally, the beaming smile of my son the morning after the night I sleep-trained him for the first time (during which he cried for three hours) is proof that he doesn’t hold any grudge. Let’s hope the good times last!
[1] https://straitsresearch.com/report/sleep-market
[2] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/baby-products-market
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/vitalstatisticspopulationandhealthreferencetables
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