Postpartum Hotels are a Depressing Scam

It's a bad solution to an even worse problem.

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When I think of the perfect postpartum experience, I picture myself laying around for weeks in bed with my baby while we learn each other's secret language that brings us milk and sleep. My husband serves me bone broth and stew. My extended family plays outside with my children who feel loved and cared for. I don’t entertain guests, I don’t clean. I remain cocooned in dyad bliss until I feel nourished and strong enough to get to my feet. I’d spend no less than a month like this.

Of course, this is not the typical postpartum experience for most American mothers. Not even close.  One in four mothers return two weeks after giving birth. For working moms lucky enough to take a few months off after giving birth, their postpartum starts with getting rolled out of a hospital, after a number of sleepless nights of having their babies monitored, poked, jabbed, weighed, and a stern warning to never put a baby in your bed. Then there’s the in-laws to host, the other children to care for, the photos to send everyone, and then the crushing feeling of watching your husband return to work —and not even a drop of bone broth. After the months spent fretting on which wallpaper to put in the nursery or which bluetooth video monitor to buy, new moms quickly find themselves overwhelmed and incredulous. 

Some would say our country’ maternity care is corrupt and broken and it would take radical paradigm shift to place birth and postpartum. 

Others would look at this problem and see a “hole in the market” and a “business opportunity.” 

Enter luxury postpartum hotels like Boram, Ahma&Co, and Sanhu house. All claim to take their cues from Eastern traditions (such as sanhujori) , that require new mothers to stay in bed for 30 days while her family cooks hearty meals, cleans her house, brews medicinal teas, massage her, and basically mother her while she mothers her child. The modern twist? You get this sort of treatment for one week, by strangers, and for $1,500 a night. 

And people say late-stage capitalism is heartless. 😏

These hotel stays are branded as ‘postnatal retreats’. They first emerged in major cities in South Korea, Japan, and China, where these ancient traditions that were once practiced throughout generations started to break down as families became more atomized and moved further away from each other. Starting in the early Aughts, these retreats and centers, we’re fairly barebones but still acknowledged that women needed a soft landing and transition between birth and motherhood. Over the last 20 years, they’ve scaled up and now offer complete course in luxury with doulas, room service, massages, yoga, parenting classes, ‘feeding’ support, mother’s lounges, and of course, nurseries. 

Hotel conglomerates like Waldorf-Astoria and start-up entrepreneurs, are getting in on the action state side. 

“Well be your village,” says Boram’s website, a postpartum center which is located on the ninth floor of the five-star Langham Hotel in New York City. 

Boram, and similar centers around the U.S. focus on feeding the mothers, pampering, and attending to all the needs of the mother, sometimes at the exclusion of her baby.

In almost all “review” type articles about a stay at Boram, the mom suffered from a long and traumatic birth and praises the center for being a safe and comfortable place she could recover.  

Moms who reviewed Boram on Tik Tok all seemed to love one thing the best: the nursery, where the baby sleeps “all night” with doulas that watch the baby while you have “date nights”. This sort of separation can have devastating consequences for the mom’s milk supply and normalizes the very abnormal practice of sleeping away from your newborn. Even if you don’t send you baby to the nursery, all rooms come equipped with a ‘hospital grade bassinet’.

Daycare is Normalized But it Ain't Normal

In our culture, the focus of postpartum is squarely on the infant and not the mother, so these retreats are certainly trying to compensate for that.  All of these offerings are focused on the mother and suggest that the best way for her to rest and recover is that she takes some time away from her newborn.

HOWEVER ideal postpartum care isn’t narrowly focused on either mother or baby but THE MOTHERBABY DYAD. The baby is PART of the mother. The reason why ‘the village’ shows up in traditional and pre-modern cultures after a mother gives birth is not so they can ‘replace’ the mother but so that mother can focus solely on mothering. This helps the mother build confidence in blossoming relationship with her newborn. 

These hotels play on dangerous theme that’s so prevalent in mordern motherhood these days: motherbaby need “separation” in order to “preserve mental health” of the mother. Moms will never feel empowered to be the authority on their own babies if they are constantly to outsourcing knowledge to ‘experts’. You build that confidence through doing.

If you happen to be rich and are looking for a soft transition into motherhood helped by a crew of other women, it’s doubtful you’ll leave one of these retreats with many tools to help for the months ahead. You may know how to swaddle a baby thanks to 30 minute activity you attended but there’s a good chance that you never learned how to safely co-sleep, what the difference is between a hungry cry and sleepy cry, what you will need in your own home to keep your sanity.

Of course, many of us are atomized and alienated from ‘our villages’. We may not have a circle of trusted adults who could jump in to help give motherbaby a soft landing but going to hotel and then relying on a underpaid service works to feel for a week feels, as the kids say, problematic. 

And the most glaringly problematic aspect: $6,000 for a week’s stay at a postpartum hotel is something only the rich can reasonably afford and guess what? The rich are the last people who are in desperate need of postpartum support. That’s the thing about being rich you don’t really need stuff. We’re still plugging the holes instead of fixing these systemic problems at the root. 

If you can spend $6k to have a nourishing and comfy postpartum, do it.

But you can DIY a Boram experience at home while prioritizing bonding with your baby; leaving behind the idea that you need to separate from him in order to “return to your best self”. Hire a chef, hire a nanny for your other kids, get those high thread count sheets but don’t outsource your own intuition. You don’t need a nurse to teach you how to sponge bath your baby.  You do not become infantilized yourself.

Further, is this the best we can do in America? Should we start seeing birth and postpartum as an investment we save for akin to a wedding? After all, people have no problem dropping 25-30K on a wedding. What would truly investing in a postpartum look like? Instead of asking “what wallpaper should go in the nursery?” and “What’s the best baby monitor to put on my registry” mothers need to start asking themselves a different of set questions that our culture refuses to answer:

What does the motherbaby dyad need to thrive?

You won’t be cooking so how will you eat?

What food would be the most nourishing?

What healing and help do you want for your body?

What sort of help do you want for breastfeeding?

What can your partner do to support you?

What type of support does your partner need that OTHER people can help with?

What parts of the house must be clean so you can relax?

What’s the plan for the endless laundry that will not cease despite the fact that you just created a new life?

Who can you trust when you have questions?

Who can you call if you are alone and sad in the middle of the night?

What music, television, books, sounds, smells will be soothing for your nervous system?

You can certainly spend $6k answering these questions but it costs nothing to ask.