Every Saturday at 6 a.m., two weekend nannies arrive at Christine Landis’s home in San Diego, California, to wake up her two young children, make breakfast and manage the morning routine. Landis, a 44-year-old former fintech CEO, does not usually come downstairs until around 9 a.m. after having coffee and talking in bed with her husband.

It’s all part of a home routine that costs $250,000 annually to run and includes a live-in family assistant, weekend care team, housekeeper and private chef who serves them three-course dinners at home while they wear pajamas.

Landis, who sold her tech firm before launching the home-management platform Peacock Parent, does not see outsourcing as stepping back from parenting. It is about applying business logic to buy back time, she said.

“Why are we trying to do it all ourselves when we would never apply that same principle at our job?” Landis told The Independent. “In the companies we work for, we scale for profit. We are delegating. We are outsourcing. You are proud of that fact. And yet at home, I see it as scaling for joy.”

Time is money

These types of highly-choreographed setups are becoming increasingly common among ultra-wealthy families. Rather than relying on a single nanny or an occasional babysitter, executive parents are bringing in multi-person support teams to manage the household. Domestic staffing agencies and luxury parenting concierges report a rise in demand for specialized help as they increasingly place family assistants, private chefs, coaches and night nurses.

Professional potty-training consultants who work intensively with toddlers can charge anywhere from $600 for virtual support — such as the consult packages offered by NYC Potty Training — to thousands of dollars for multi-day in-home guidance. And private bike-riding lessons, traditionally considered a weekend parenting rite of passage, routinely run hundreds of dollars per session.

To Landis, “scaling” means delegating routine household duties to clear space for the time she spends with her two children, aged five and seven. Anything logistics-heavy or purely functional typically gets handed off to her household staff.

“I still change diapers, but so did our nanny and a night nurse,” Landis said. “I don't have a chef there in the morning, but do we have egg bites already prepped for us? And do we have bacon that’s already been cooked? Yes.”

Domestic infrastructure

Supporting these elaborate setups is a growing network of boutique staffing firms, offering affluent households everything from executive-level HR vetting to full-service lifestyle management.

For long-term domestic infrastructure, agencies like British American Household Staffing, which operates across major cities including London, New York, Los Angeles and Dubai, act as matchmakers for families seeking full-scale support.

The firm focuses on vetting and sourcing highly specialized domestic teams. This includes rotational nannies, Norland-trained childcare specialists (graduates from the elite British nanny school), night nurses, house managers, executive personal assistants and private chefs.

“The traditional nanny remains an essential role, but we are increasingly seeing families think beyond a single hire and build a more comprehensive support structure,” Anita Rogers, founder and CEO of BAHS, told The Independent. “Rather than expecting one person to handle everything, families are recognizing the value of hiring specialists with clearly defined responsibilities.”

This shift is driven by high-earning parents explicitly seeking to run their homes with corporate-level efficiency.

“Many larger households now function much like privately run organizations,” Rogers said. “A household manager may oversee staff, budgets, vendors and multiple properties, while a family assistant coordinates travel, school schedules and the family’s day-to-day logistics.”

Building out this kind of domestic enterprise comes with a hefty price tag. According to Rogers, rotational arrangements are particularly in demand for nannies, newborn care specialists, chefs and private drivers. Annual payroll for a fully staffed household commonly exceeds $1 million before benefits and other employment expenses. For a large estate, Rogers says approximately $5 million per year in staffing costs is common, with budgets potentially reaching $10 million.

The firm guides parents through complex household logistics, advising on competitive salaries, schedule structuring, benefits and local tax compliance. Candidates undergo multi-tier vetting, including background checks, past employer reference audits and in-home trial periods, to ensure personality fits and strict non-disclosure discretion before a contract is ever signed.

Addressing critics who claim that multi-staff households amount to delegating basic parenting, Rogers argues that professional support serves the opposite purpose.

“Household staffing is not about outsourcing parenthood,” Rogers said. “It is about supporting it. When each staff member has a clearly defined role, parents are freed from much of the domestic and logistical work and can spend more meaningful time with their children — whether they are playing together, having conversations about values or working one-on-one on schoolwork.”

Parenthood, curated

While placement agencies like BAHS build out a home’s permanent workforce, luxury parenting concierges manage the immediate demands of family life.

U.K.-based The Luxury Parent Concierge operates on an advisory model, stepping in to curate and coordinate every stage of early parenthood. Rather than managing daily chores directly, their concierges handle niche operational logistics, from birth planning, nursery interior design and eco-friendly baby-proofing to sourcing night nannies, meal delivery services and maternal wellness experts.

Founded by Zoe Kerswill, a former Montessori educator and private maternity nurse, the agency grew out of a realization that executive parents needed someone to sort through the endless decisions that come with having a baby.

“Parents today are much more involved in the day-to-day raising of their children than ever before,” Kerswill told The Independent. “They're not looking to hand over parenting — they want to be present for every milestone. What they’re looking for is the right support around them so they can actually enjoy it.”

That support can range from standard sleep training and custom travel itineraries to hyper-specific concierge tasks like baby name consulting, hospital bag curation, and sourcing bespoke luxury items, including a solid gold pacifier for one client.

“One of the wildest requests I’ve ever had was being asked to source a solid gold dummy [pacifier],” Kerswill said. “It definitely wasn't something I'd expected, but it's a great example of how varied concierge requests can be.”

For busy executives, however, hiring this level of support is less about outsourcing and more about bringing intention to the hours they spend with their children.

“They're outsourcing the research, the planning and the endless decision-making," Kerswill added. “Many families are starting to view their home life with the same level of intention that they once reserved for their careers. It’s no longer about choosing between a successful career and being a present parent — it's about building the right support around them so they can have both.”

The ‘silver-spoon’ backlash

Spending $250,000 a year on household help inevitably gets people talking. When Landis shares her setup publicly, critics are quick to accuse her of dodging basic parenting duties or spoiling her kids.

Landis argues that people misunderstand how her household actually runs, noting that her children are still held to clear standards, from clearing their plates into the dishwasher to carrying wet sheets downstairs after a nighttime bed accident.

“The assumption is that they’re just being fed a silver spoon, and that's actually a huge reason why I started Peacock Parent — to put a face to it,” Landis said.

“There is a lot more normalcy as far as the lessons we are teaching our children, the standards we are holding them to, than people would assume when you just hear chef, family assistant and all those labeled in one line.”

Micro-outsourcing on a budget

To make this approach accessible beyond seven-figure budgets, Landis founded Peacock Parent and launched Proxy, an on-demand texting and home-management platform designed to help working families streamline household logistics and delegate the mental load as an executive would.

The company advocates a “micro-outsourcing” strategy. Rather than maintaining a full-time staff, families operating on smaller budgets identify their single highest-friction chore, whether that’s paying $20 for a drop-off wash-and-fold laundry service, using grocery delivery to skip weekly store runs or hiring a local college student for two hours on Sundays to fold clothes and prep lunches.

For Kerswill, outsourcing household logistics is an evolution of traditional family values.

“I've always believed in the saying that it takes a village to raise a child,” Kerswill said. “The difference is that today’s village simply looks different. It might include a maternity nurse, a trusted nanny, a sleep consultant or a lactation specialist. By delegating the logistics to trusted experts, parents are creating more time and headspace to focus on the moments that really matter.”

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