These days, new parents are flooded with information, thanks to smart baby monitors, parenting influencers, and ChatGPT-generated answers for every late-night worry. For two professional baby whisperers who were around before the flood of technology, part of the job is simply helping overwhelmed, sleep-deprived parents cut through all the noise. “This is the most marketed-to generation ever,” says Jennifer Walker, cofounder of Moms on Call, an Atlanta-based company offering babycare and toddler advice, which has developed a cultlike following over the past 22 years. “Everything that we do is because there’s a mom or a dad out there who is being told 10 different things.”
The company, which Walker cofounded with fellow pediatric nurse Laura Hunter in 2004, began as a home-printed pamphlet filled with practical newborn advice (how to get your baby to sleep, how to introduce solid foods), which turned into a series of paperback books that are often passed from family to family. Though the advice is eternal, Moms on Call has evolved with the times: This year, the company released a new app that offers interactive features to help parents implement and use their method. But the time-tested recommendations for raising kids remains the same.
Parents can use the app to log their baby’s feedings, naps, and wake windows and receive clear schedules that map out exactly how a day could look for a five-week-old, a 10-week-old, or beyond. Users can post age-specific questions in the community forum and get answers from experts, or pay $75 a week for one-on-one messaging with a Moms on Call consultant, all of them pediatric nurses as well as mothers. And there are short, daily messages—one for each day of a baby’s first year—pairing a practical piece of advice with a small dose of reassurance.
“Sometimes what you need isn’t just another tip,” Walker says. “It’s someone saying, ‘This is normal. Keep going.’”
Walker and Hunter met as colleagues at North Atlanta Pediatric Associates, where they frequently shared shifts as on-call nurses. Between them, they had eight children—both with a set of twins—which gave them front-row seats to early parenthood’s realities. As they fielded calls from exhausted families, they began noticing patterns. “It wasn’t emergencies,” Hunter recalls. “It was day-to-day life with a newborn. And everybody was asking the same questions at 2 a.m.” Hunter, with a one-week-old baby at home, typed up a simple folder of instructions: how to swaddle, how to bathe a newborn, how to clip tiny fingernails.
Photograph by Aaron Schorch
On the side, Walker and Hunter began offering in-home consultations, charging $75 to $150 per visit. They would walk into a family’s house and demonstrate the basics of babycare, step by step. “Sometimes you just need someone to show you,” Walker says.
From those sessions emerged their signature offering: structured daily schedules organized by age, with blocks for feeding, sleeping, and wake time. They called themselves Moms on Call as both a literal description (they were mothers taking after-hours calls) and a promise.
The response was immediate. Parents began calling—not only with new questions, but also with gratitude. “One time, a lady rolled down her window in traffic, with her kid in a car seat, to tell me, ‘You helped me get this kid to sleep!’” Walker says.
From there, word about these “Moms on Call” spread in the pre–social media way, through recommendations from grateful families. After Hunter did a consultation with country music star Kenny Rogers and his wife, Wanda—then living in Atlanta and adjusting to life as new parents of twins—the impressed musician encouraged them to think bigger. In 2004, Walker and Hunter self-published their first book, complete with a DVD tucked into the back cover.
Over the years, Moms on Call has expanded well beyond Atlanta: The company has sold over 1.5 million books, and its most recent edition reached number 24 on Amazon’s overall bestseller list. Since their first app launched in 2009, there have been over 1 million downloads. And their newest app is being used in more than 44 countries.
Through it all, Hunter and Walker have built the business side by side, teaching themselves everything from website design to accounting and shipping. Their partnership is complementary. Walker is the writer, with an ear for striking the right reassuring tone; Hunter is the pragmatist, focused on step-by-step execution. They’ve always agreed on the goal: giving parents clear, usable information.
Courtesy of Moms on Call
“We recognized that people need someone in the trenches with them, and that they want [advice] that feels digestible,” Walker says. “The book is in outline format, and the app is intuitive, so that we can make it easier for people.”
The duo’s assurance drew Grant Park resident Sabrina Sexton to Moms on Call in 2015, when her son Benjamin was three weeks old. Like many new parents, Sexton and her husband had prepared extensively but found themselves unmoored once they brought their baby home. They kept Benjamin in a bassinet next to their bed, and every sound woke them. “I swear we could hear every moan, every sigh,” she says. “It was like we could hear the cell division happening. None of us were sleeping.”
Desperate, she reached out to Moms on Call for a consultation. Hunter came to their home and stayed for nearly two hours. “She was like a magical baby whisperer,” Sexton says. “But it wasn’t magic; it was that she showed us exactly what to do.”
Hunter demonstrated how to swaddle and bathe Benjamin, how to recognize his feeding cues, how to get on a schedule of napping, feeding, and wake time. She made one suggestion that initially felt daunting: If room-sharing wasn’t working, move him to another room. But they tried it, and within weeks, Benjamin was sleeping through the night. “The first time it happened, I took a picture because I couldn’t believe it,” Sexton says.
After more than two decades, the scale of what Walker and Hunter built still surprises them. What began as a side project—something to “pay for groceries,” as Hunter puts it—has become a global resource.
“We still wake up and we’re like, What?” Hunter says. “This is a folder that we printed off of our computer. That’s what it still feels like, and meanwhile we’re reaching parents all over the world.”
This article appears in our July 2026 issue.
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Jennifer Rainey Marquez
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