Parents invest in a rest at $300 a night
IVF twins, same-sex couples and more working mums has seen a rise in parents hiring night nurses
Kiwi parents are spending about $300 for the gift of a good night’s sleep.
The night nurse is a common form of child care overseas in which a trained early childhood worker relieves parents of the overnight duties for their newborn to 5-year-old children.
And it is now on the rise in New Zealand.
A typical shift lasts from 9pm to 7am and involves feeding, changing, monitoring and bathing the children as well as advice on breastfeeding and routine.
Night Nannies Auckland general manager Anka Bartulovich said the evolution of the modern Kiwi parent to encompass same-sex couples, breadwinning mothers and globetrotting young families had driven expansion in the business.
“Sleep is a commodity these days and people will pay for it — to invest in rest,” Bartulovich said. “Women are pulling the same, if not more income, than their partners and they need to get back to the coal face faster.
“The massive onslaught of twins being born due to IVF and fertility treatment is another strain.
“New Zealand as a whole is accepting more immigrants so parents are not having family support available. The other reason is grandparents who are still working and not available to care for their grandchildren like they once did.
“Same-sex parents are on the rise, very much we get two dads. I don’t know why, I think a guy is happier to pay someone.”
Online searches uncovered four businesses in New Zealand dedicated to night nurse services, with the average cost for one night’s care about $300.
Rockmybaby is Australasia’s largest nanny recruitment service and a salesperson said they had received a “significant increase” in demand for night nannies in recent years.
Aucklander Sonya Peters gave birth to premature twins on December 19, 2017, and has employed night nurses three to four nights a week.
“I remember quite vividly, the first night we had a nanny we went to bed at 9pm and woke up at 6am, and we liked each other again. This fog had lifted, we absolutely felt like new humans.
“It’s not for everyone, it’s incredibly expensive. But I don’t have siblings, my father’s dead. I don’t really have any other family support, so night nannies can be part of your tribe if that makes sense.”
Sarah Le Guennec said the recent addition of now-11-week-old twins to the family pushed her to the “point of exhaustion, basically”.
“I was getting around one to two hours of sleep a night since I had my twins. That built up over time, you get quite exhausted,” said Le Guennec, who hires Night Nannies three times a week.
“My husband’s at work during the day, I’m alone with the twins, we don’t have a nanny during the day, so just to have that rest guaranteed through the night is amazing.”
Bartulovich said cost prevented the service entering the Kiwi mainstream.
“Throughout UK and parts of Europe, everyone from middle class to higher income earners will use a night nanny in some capacity, whether it’s once, to seven nights a week for three months. Whereas here, to be honest, it’s more the higher socio-economic groups.”
Night nurses have been used by overseas celebrities including Megan Fox, Zara Philips, Gwyneth Paltrow and Minnie Driver.
Bartulovich said the service was increasingly becoming a gift at baby showers — particularly from mothersin-law.
She said part of the cost was the lack of night nurse training courses in New Zealand, despite several attempts to get one accredited by NZQA in the last 10 years.
Her own UK study in 2009 covered such things as postnatal care, infant development, sleep settling, general health of mothers, handling milk safely and introducing solids.
Massey University Professor of Sociology Paul Spoonley said although the fertility rate in New Zealand was dropping, the age at which women were having their first child was increasing.
The most common age of Kiwi women giving birth last year was 30-34, and Spoonley said this impacted parenting practices: “The Prime Minister having her first child at 37 as a working mum is not at all unusual. But by your mid-to-late 30s, women are quite often in senior positions and they take a lot of time and energy.
“If you’ve got disposable income, you essentially purchase help to look after your children. So you’re not poor in terms of income but you’re very time-poor.”
Spoonley said the service of night nurses fell more broadly into “professionalisation of home services”.
“It covers everything from maintenance to the weekly clean. It’s almost like you’re going back to the Victorian era where you had servants.”