Our Story

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Let Mommy Sleep was founded by CEO Denise Iacona Stern after the birth of her twins and a bout of pre-eclampsia in 2009. At the time, she was also caring for a one-year-old and recovering from birth complications. Even with extended family help, managing two newborns and a young toddler while ordered on bedrest quickly proved unsustainable.

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With a background in small business and firsthand experience navigating postpartum care, Iacona Stern created Let Mommy Sleep to deliver the kind of structured, overnight support that proved critical to her own family’s health. The first location opened in Washington, DC in 2010. Demand grew rapidly as families sought qualified, accountable newborn care providers and caregivers sought a professional framework grounded in training, licensure, and responsibility.

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National Leadership and Growth

Within its first year, Let Mommy Sleep gained national attention and has since been cited consistently by major media outlets as a trusted authority in postpartum and newborn care, including the Washington Post, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, NPR, Business Insider, and the Financial Times. Local owners are regularly called upon as subject-matter experts in infant safety and early parenting education. See our full press and media library

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Early partnerships including a Fairfax County, Virginia government contract from 2015 to 2021 to teach newborn care, established the foundation for responsible national expansion. Today, Let Mommy Sleep continues to grow through licensing, bringing standardized, evidence-based postpartum care to communities across the country.

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In 2025, Let Mommy Sleep was recognized with the TITAN Award for Women in Business and the Mom’s Choice Award, recognition of 15 years of leadership in an industry that did not have professional standards when Let Mommy Sleep entered it.

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Our Clinical Standards

Let Mommy Sleep’s caregiver standards are not informal guidelines. They are documented, reviewed, and enforced across every location in the network. Clinical oversight is provided by an Advisory Board of Registered Nurses and subject matter experts established in 2016, the same board that reviews the curriculum behind the National Newborn and Postpartum Support (NAPS) Registry, the credentialing program Let Mommy Sleep built for the broader newborn care workforce.

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All caregivers across all locations are required to hold evidence-based newborn and postpartum care certification, infant safe sleep certification aligned with AAP guidelines, current CPR and First Aid, up-to-date vaccinations including pertussis, and pass background screening. These requirements have been in place since 2010, nearly a decade before the industry began public conversations about standardization.

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In 2026, Iacona Stern published The State of Newborn Care, a workforce policy paper on SSRN submitted for peer review. The paper documents the absence of national standards in the in-home newborn care industry and calls for mandatory training, credentialing, and accountability requirements. It is the formal articulation of what Let Mommy Sleep has been practicing since its founding

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Commitment Beyond Business

In 2012, after witnessing the measurable impact of postpartum support on family health, the non-profit Mission: Sleep was founded. Mission: Sleep is a nonprofit providing free overnight newborn care to military and first-responder families whose newborns arrive during deployment, injury, or loss. From 2013 to 2025, Mission: Sleep extended Let Mommy Sleep care to families who needed it most and could not otherwise access it.
 

Together, Let Mommy Sleep and Mission: Sleep were guided by a shared belief: when families receive meaningful support early, outcomes improve for the family and for the community around them.

 

The Licensing Model

Let Mommy Sleep grows through a structured licensing model that allows motivated operators to run locally owned businesses under national standards. Licensees are not passive investors, rather they are community leaders who recruit and lead caregiver teams, build referral relationships with healthcare providers, and deliver the Let Mommy Sleep standard of care in their specific market.
 

The licensing model was designed to scale what works. Every tool, system, and standard that Let Mommy Sleep developed over 15+ years of direct operation is available to licensees from day one, so they are not building from scratch. They are building on a foundation.
 

Interested in bringing Let Mommy Sleep to your community? Read our complete guide to the licensing opportunity.