Days after giving birth to her first child, Jill Deutsch was hobbling to a doctor’s appointment on a bum ankle when the baby nurse she hired to help care for her newborn called her — with specific meal demands.
First, it was a Big Mac with a fountain soda for lunch. Then came a request for a specific cut of salmon for dinner — and she demanded to know the seasoning ahead of time.
“I had this ankle brace on. I’m on the crosstown bus, which was mobbed. I’m carrying a soda, her Big Mac, the fish, and then my dinner, and it was just nuts,” Deutsch told The Post.
The nurse, whom Deutsch found through a recommendation, also criticized the furniture in her home, including the living room couch she was supposed to sleep on, and was appalled it wasn’t comfortable enough for her.
Within a day, the new mom had fired the nurse — but it opened her eyes to the wild west world of baby nursing.
Nowadays, the hottest postpartum accessory for affluent NYC families is a baby nurse — who often spends long days, and nights, tending to newborns so new parents can rest and recover from birth.
The most sought-after names, who charge anywhere from $400 to $800 a day and find work through private referrals, WhatsApp chats, and mom Facebook groups, often need to be secured as soon as there’s a positive pregnancy test.
But a battle is brewing between anxious first-time parents and these nurses.
Parents claim they’re being taken advantage of with outrageous demands and wants regarding cost, control, food, hours worked, and expectations.
But the nurses say wealthy parents can be equally demanding — expecting round-the-clock attention, little rest and an ever-expanding list of duties simply because they’re paying a premium.
“I hired a night nurse before any of my friends knew I was pregnant,” expecting mom-to-be Lizzy Livne told The Post.
Although the 33-year-old owns a digital concierge service, Quiet Lux, where she helps clients find their own baby nurses, finding one for herself was an overwhelming, tedious process.
She said the competition can get messy, as there are about 20 “top names” NYC parents are desperate to hire — giving these caregivers somewhat of an upper hand in their wild demands.
Livne recalled one client who paid well above market per day for her baby nurse, who then asked for an additional daily $100 grocery allowance. Another client was expected to buy three Starbucks coffees a day for her nurse, despite having a $3,500 Jura coffee machine at home.
“…They [the nurses] take advantage of the fact that you’re paying them $400, $500, $600 cash out of pocket, which means you have to pull in 30 to 40% more of that on a pre-tax basis,” the Upper East Sider pointed out.
“You want to pay what’s fair. So, how do you define fair?” Livne questioned. “You look for market comps, [but] there are almost no comps because there’s this sense that if you love your child, you will pay this amount, and the nurses know how to sell it to you in that way. There’s this perception that if you live in Manhattan, you don’t have a budget.
“I felt on every single call I was being worked,” Livne complained. “They know exactly how to speak to you if they think you’re an Upper East Side [or] Tribeca mom who’s going to be anxious about your firstborn.”
“This is a black market. We’re all paying cash, and we’re all paying a lot of cash,” she groaned.
One New Jersey mom, who asked to remain anonymous, agreed.
The 35-year-old told The Post that one of her baby nurses routinely made pricey requests — from lamb chops for dinner to kitchen appliances like air fryers and toaster ovens, to Zara outfits, rugs for her daughter’s apartment and wigs for church friends.
“…some even want you to take them shopping. But the joke is on us because we have to rely on them and they know it,” she said.
A self-described people pleaser, the new mom emphasized to The Post that there is nothing scarier for parents than leaving their child alone with someone they don’t know, or leaving a postpartum woman alone without support.
“You kind of just want them [the nurses] to be so happy,” the mother of two told The Post. “The wads of cash given per week, you can’t even imagine,” she said. “We sleep, they stay up with the baby. Because of this, I would literally do anything they wanted.”
This is exactly why many parents feel like their hands are tied. And it doesn’t help that there’s no universal rulebook for what comes with the job.
Some caregivers spell out meals, sleeping arrangements and breaks during the interview process, while others work out those details once they are hired and already at the family’s home.
But the complaints go beyond pricey groceries and comfortable beds — parents also described lost deposits, last-minute substitutions and caregivers appearing to book multiple families over the same dates.
Livne recalled two friends who recently discovered they had booked the same nurse for overlapping weekends — after both had already paid deposits.
The New Yorker explained that some nurses double-book for job security and use a low-end offer to bid up other parts of the market.
“Meaning, I’ll lock them in for $300. They’ll feel comfortable that they have a job for those few months. Then they’ll get another offer later on that’s better, and then they’ll screw me and keep my deposit,” she said.
Some parents believe it’s done deliberately to instigate a bait-and-switch, or grow their referral network.
“They’ll say, ‘No, I’m full but I have a friend and then suddenly you’re getting texted by the friends. You have no idea who this friend is and why a random stranger has your number now…” Livne explained, equating it to getting bombarded by health insurance brokers.
Veteran baby nurse Alicia Wilson admits that this practice is hardly unheard of.
“In the industry, baby nurses, they like to double-book and triple-book,” Wilson, who has spent roughly 30 years caring for newborns, told The Post. “Whoever comes first, they take, and then they give you a story.”
Wilson, who is loved by many NYC parents, said her team does not operate that way and contacts families immediately if a caregiver can no longer take a job.
But Wilson said parents aren’t the only ones who can feel taken advantage of.
“You have to feed them [the nurses],” she told The Post.
For caregivers working 10- or 12-hour overnight shifts, sometimes after long commutes, she said meals are part of the job’s practical reality.
Rest can be another point of friction.
The New York caregiver explained that some parents expect round-the-clock help, which means a caregiver is constantly awake and available — something that is biologically impossible. And with 24/7, live-in care, a 5-hour break is the standard.
Wilson also thoroughly screens prospective families to avoid mismatched personalities, which can leave both sides trapped in an arrangement neither likes.
“They don’t like me. I don’t like them, but they need me. I need them,” she said. “You have to have a connection,” she said. “We are the people who are going to come into your home to see your most vulnerable moments.”
And sometimes, the source of tension isn’t even the parents.
“In-laws and grandparents, oh my god,” Wilson said, explaining that clashes with pushy relatives who want newborns cared for in a particular way became so common that she now includes clauses in her contracts about parents managing extended family.
Her contracts also explicitly outline job length, pay and reimbursement grounds for either side to terminate the arrangement.
Newborn care specialist Lexi Jeffries also uses contracts because hazy expectations can cut both ways.
She has seen caregivers structure a baby’s schedule around getting more rest themselves — something she considers inappropriate — but has also seen parents request “awake care,” expecting someone to stay up through the night, without paying accordingly.
“I just don’t think that aligns with the expectation of what awake care comes with,” Jeffries, who has worked in overnight newborn care for a decade, told The Post.
Money can become contentious when families’ needs change, too.
Jeffries now spells out guaranteed hours in her contracts after encountering parents who wanted to cut back once their babies began sleeping longer.
“I’ve already committed my time for this,” she said. “That’s income that I’m missing out on.”
She also knows that once the baby comes, personalities can change, and the nurse should be able to adapt.
“I understand that sometimes in the interview, mom comes across a certain way, dad comes across a certain way. After birth, those things may change; their expectations may change, and it may be different than what they asked for or thought that they needed.”
For one first-time mom, that dependence became especially clear in 2021, when pandemic restrictions prevented her own mother from traveling to the US.
She and her husband hired a caregiver for six weeks and discussed possibly extending to eight, but when they stopped at six, the nurse said they still owed her for the final two because she had turned down another job.
“We just paid her for those weeks anyway just so it didn’t end acrimoniously,” she told The Post.
Looking back, she said, “We were so worried about not losing our only support system, we just did everything this lady asked of us. At times it was more like we worked for her, not the other way round.”
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