Do Fathers Really Hear Crying Babies Less? What a New Study Shows

Professor Christine Parsons and PhD student Arnault Quentin-Vermillet first examined hearing differences in men and women who did not yet have children: 142 adults without children, male and female participants alike, were tested on how responsive to very quiet sounds and to louder infant crying they were while asleep (DOI: 10.1037/emo0001478). Men and women’s ability to wake up to whisper-level infant crying differed only slightly: men are slightly less likely than women to awaken to quiet crying sounds, but just as likely as women to awaken to both crying sounds and alarms at a louder volume. That is the full extent of any innate difference in hearing sensitivity between men and women the study shows.

Then came the second part: a new study from Aarhus University followed 117 first-time parents, tracking who actually got up when the baby cried at night over a full week. Mothers still were three times more likely to handle nighttime infant care than fathers in that real-world tracking, even though the earlier hearing test found men are not meaningfully less likely to hear babies crying. As the researchers put it, several factors that explain the gap must sit outside of hearing: the large difference in nighttime care cannot be explained by the minor differences we observed in sound sensitivity between men and women's ears. It is not a coincidence, and it is not a quirk of the data: something else is driving the gap.

In other words, this debunks the myth of women's special ability to hear a crying baby that men supposedly can't hear. Fathers don’t have a hearing problem; they have a getting-up-anyway problem, and the two are not the same thing.

Researchers found the numbers held up under scrutiny: women were about 14 percent more likely to wake to the quietest sounds, but men proved just as able to hear a loud, sustained cry as women were, which is the full extent of any biological differences the lab test turned up. The study, built around men and women's waking patterns to infant crying, makes the point directly in its own conclusion: preparenthood hearing differences are too small to explain who ends up out of bed. Once real families were tracked, the same data also found that women kept answering the second and third crying episode most nights, night after night, regardless of how well their partner could technically hear.

It isn't that women have some special ability to hear baby crying that men lack, or hear babies crying at night when men supposedly can't. Both parents can hear the cries just fine; historically, only one of them has usually been expected to act on it. Being first to hear the crying was never really a special maternal skill; it is usually just who has agreed, out loud or not, to take care of the baby at 3 a.m. The night crying itself doesn't discriminate by gender. The response to it still does, and that gap in how men and women respond to nighttime crying while asleep is what the second half of this research set out to measure directly. Are men really less likely to hear a baby, or is that really less likely to hear claim just a convenient story? Women were only slightly more likely than men to awaken to the very quietest sounds, which is not the same as saying women do more nighttime care because they hear better.

The Real Size of the Nighttime Care Gap

While the hearing gap is small, the actual gap in who gets up is not. A separate 2025 study measured it directly across two groups of families, and the imbalance was large in both.

Researchers tracked which parent handled overnight care in a clinical group and a control group of families dealing with childhood sleep disorders and typical sleep patterns alike (DOI: 10.3390/children12040491). Mothers provided exclusive overnight care in 60% of cases in the clinical group and 64% in the control group, compared to 9% and 6% for fathers respectively. Averaged across both groups, they were involved in that care about 94% of the time, fathers around 36%, making them roughly three times more involved overall, night after night, well beyond the newborn stage.

That is the gap the small hearing difference is supposed to explain, and clearly does not. The data showed that women, far more than men, keep absorbing most of the disrupted sleep long after the postpartum period ends; the same pattern showed that mothers stay the default parent on duty well into toddlerhood, a nighttime parenting habit that outlasts the newborn stage.

If It's Not Hearing, What Is It?

If biology only accounts for a sliver of the difference, the rest comes down to something researchers describe as learned patterns rather than an innate trait.

The Aarhus researchers point to social practices, work arrangements, and early habits at home as the more likely drivers, patterns that tend to form in the first weeks and then stick for years. Related research on parental sleep adaptation finds moms tend to adjust their own sleep to a child's patterns more than fathers do, for children well beyond infancy. None of this is fixed at birth. It is closer to a default that gets set early and rarely gets renegotiated later, because by the time anyone notices, it already feels like "how things are" in that household.

Part of why the myth survives is that it is convenient for everyone involved. It gives the parent who sleeps through the night a tidy explanation that does not require a conversation, and it gives the parent who gets up a story that at least makes the imbalance feel like biology rather than a choice nobody made out loud. Once a couple settles into a routine where one adult reliably wakes and the other reliably does not, each additional night quietly reinforces the pattern, whether or not the original assumption about hearing was ever true.

The surprising research behind why women still do most of the getting-up has little to do with their ears and a lot to do with habit. Related work, drawing on 117 first-time parents in Denmark, consistently finds that women wake for infants more often than men across nearly every measure the researchers behind the study tracked, from the raw number of times at night each parent got up to how quickly they responded once awake. It isn't that babies are crying more often for one parent than the other, and it isn't that fathers are somehow less sensitive to infant cries once you control for who is actually on duty. The old joke that dads didn’t even hear the baby cry doesn't match what the data shows; it is closer to the truth to say fathers can’t hear an alarm that was never really set for them in the first place, and the differences between men's and women's actual hearing were never the real story. Paternity leave policies, work schedules, and who took charge of nighttime caregiving in the very first weeks all shape whether women wake up with infants by default or whether both parents share the job, and on any given night, whether the father woke up more often or the mother did tends to follow that early pattern rather than anyone's hearing.

The Nuance: When the Gap Shrinks

This does not mean every couple lives with a three-times gap forever, or that the imbalance is only ever about who is more "naturally" attentive.

A separate study comparing subjective and objective sleep in working parents with comparable daytime work hours found something more nuanced: actigraphy showed only a modest difference in sleep duration between the two parents, not the sharp sleep quality gap they often report from perceived sleep alone, and the perceived imbalance did not predict parental stress levels (DOI: 10.2147/NSS.S323991). In that population, women sleep only slightly longer on average than men, which cuts against the mommy-is-always-exhausted narrative even as moms still handle most of the actual wake-ups. The imbalance in who actually gets up for the baby, documented separately by researchers tracking overnight caregiving in detail, still showed them handling the large majority of feeding, changing, and soothing, while fathers' wake-ups skewed toward passive or self-care instances (DOI: 10.1016/j.pedhc.2013.07.016).

Read together, these studies suggest the gap is real and largely behavioral, but its size and its emotional cost vary a lot depending on how a household actually splits daytime work and night duty, not on any fixed difference between the two parents.

How Couples Actually Rebalance This

None of the research suggests this fixes itself. But a few concrete steps show up repeatedly as actionable, rather than just well-intentioned.

• Name who is on call, explicitly, rather than letting the split settle by default in the first exhausted weeks of parenthood and then never getting revisited, night after night, until exhaustion sets in for good.
• Protect a real off-duty block for whichever parent is not on call, so that parent can actually sleep through the night and sleep longer on their nights off, rather than a vague arrangement where both parents stay half-alert all night and neither one gets a good night’s sleep, waking up several times a night for no real reason.
• Make falling asleep easier for the parent off duty: a monitored nursery and a clear no-checking rule help that parent actually get back to sleep instead of half-listening every time the baby cries.
• Share the information, not just the task: alerts going to both parents, through a reliable wellness device like a baby monitor, make it harder for one parent to quietly absorb all the "just checking" wake-ups without the other one noticing, and easier for both to see the real number of times either parent got up.
• Revisit the split during maternity leave and after: what felt fair during the newborn stage and breastfeed-heavy nights often stops being fair once feeding patterns, work schedules, or childcare needs shift after childbirth.

None of this closes a three-times gap overnight, and several factors, from work schedules to parental leave policy to who is breastfeeding, will keep shaping the split for a while, along with the relationship strain that tends to build in a marriage when one partner quietly carries more of it. The imbalance often runs deeper than crying at night, too: a related look at how long maternal sleep actually takes to recover after birth covers the wider pattern beyond the hearing myth. But it gives couples something the hearing myth never did: an actual, measurable starting point for the conversation about overnight caregiving dynamics, backed by a new study rather than a guess about who should sleep better and who deserves a good night's sleep first.

FAQ

Do fathers really hear crying babies less than mothers?

Barely. A 2025 study found men are only about 14% less sensitive than women to whisper-level sounds, and just as likely to wake to loud sounds. That small gap cannot explain why it is still mum, more often than the father, who wakes up at night and handles that care three times more often, at real cost to mothers’ sleep and to overall sleep deprivation in the household, night after night, sleep at night becoming something to be negotiated rather than assumed.

If hearing isn't the reason, why do mothers wake up more?

Researchers point to learned patterns rather than biology: they tend to adapt their own sleep to the child's patterns more than fathers do, and social habits, work arrangements, and early routines set within the first weeks tend to stick.

Is the overnight care gap really three times as large?

A 2025 study of clinical and control groups found one parent provided exclusive overnight care in 60-64% of cases: the mom, versus 6-9% for the father, with moms involved in about 94% of that care overall versus 36% for fathers.

Does shared baby monitoring actually help rebalance this?

A wellness device like Mothair does not fix the imbalance by itself, but sending alerts to both parents instead of just one makes it harder for the gap to stay invisible, which is often the first step toward actually renegotiating who gets up.

How can couples rebalance overnight care in practice?

Naming who is on call on which nights, protecting real uninterrupted sleep blocks for the parent off duty, and revisiting the split as the baby's needs change are the most actionable steps the research points to.

Mothair wellness reminder: Mothair is a wellness device, it does not replace medical advice and does not diagnose anything. Every couple finds its own balance. The information in this article is general; consult your doctor, midwife, or pediatrician with any questions about your health or your baby's.