Rent-a-Mom Company Makes a Strong Statement About the Role of Motherhood

Every young adult sometimes needs a mother to turn to — just not necessarily his or her own. That’s the idea, at least, behind a unique new “rent-a-mom” service, which promises to do everything from iron your shirts to lend a sympathetic ear, all without being annoying, judgmental, or narcissistic.

Nina Keneally has just launched Need a Mom, which targets millennial hipsters in Brooklyn, N.Y. She offers herself up as a mom who “won’t question your lifestyle choice, be judgmental about your hair … or vegan diet” and “won’t keep you on the phone for 45 minutes talking about the neighbor’s cat or your uncle’s gout.” What the theater producer, former drug counselor, and mom to two sons, ages 27 and 30, will do is offer support in myriad ways: listen to your problems over a cup of coffee, bake your favorite pie, edit your resumé, watch a movie with you, take you to a doctor’s appointment — even buy, wrap, and ship a present to your own mom. She makes it clear that she’s neither a maid nor a therapist, though she will make professional referrals if needed.

STORY: Why Adele’s 3 Worlds About Parenting Mean So Much

“Mostly they just want somebody to talk to,” Keneally, 63, tells Yahoo Parenting. “I don’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve been around the block enough to be helpful.” The idea to launch her service, she explains, came shortly after she and her husband moved back to New York City after raising their children in Connecticut. They chose Brooklyn — specifically the trendy, quickly gentrifying, artist-filled neighborhood called Bushwick — and Keneally began striking up conversations with people she met in places like yoga class and the park, where she and many others would be walking their dogs.

STORY: Why Friends Make Moms Happier Than Husbands

“Some of these people began talking to me about things, like one started crying about being fired, how it wasn’t her fault, and I said, ‘Well let’s go and sit and talk about it.’ So incidents like that,” she says. Many times, she began to find, the actual parents of young adults may not understand, or “may not have the experience of living in the city, and all that goes along with that.” But Keneally — whose NYC resumé ranges from producing theater to stage managing, and whose mom chops have included everything from sewing Halloween costumes to picking her sons up from the local police station — does.

Nina Keneally (Photo: Nina Keneally)

And while she believes today that her sons choose to come to her when something is troubling them, there was a time, she says, when one of her boys was going through something a family friend understood much better. Keneally wasn’t jealous, she says, explaining, “I was just glad he had her.”

News of her service, which costs $40 an hour ($30 for new clients), has inspired envy in San Francisco — where SFGate laments, “For now, we’ll just have to fold our own clothes” — and approval from Digital Trends, which asks, “I mean, what more could you want?” Natalie Chan, 34, one of a handful of Keneally’s clients, told the New York Post that while “shrinks are just kinda impersonal,” her temporary mom “doesn’t judge. She just kinda, like, smiles and says, ‘Stop doing that.’ She’ll never say, ‘You’re stupid.’”

Jane Adams, a social psychologist and author I’m Still Your Mother: How to Get Along With Your Grown-Up Children for the Rest of Your Life, tells Yahoo Parenting that the service is a good idea if the goal is to simply get a little guidance and support — something many people may wind up looking for due to a variety of issues with their own mothers.

“Sometimes there’s just a plain old mismatch between parents and kids — called a lack of attunement, that has been there a long time, almost from infancy,” Adams says. “That’s when you’ll hear from kids who say, ‘I never felt like I fit in with my own family,’ and they are yearning for a mother connection.” For other young adults, she explains, “There’s just too much history [with their moms], and they’ve not been able to revise, amend, or fix it.” That results in parents who are deemed “too judgy” or “too disappointed in me” to be thought of as a refuges in times of need.

There are also instances of “parental narcissism,” which has a mom believing her child is an extension of herself, as well as the simple fact that “sometimes we outgrow our parents.” That can happen, Adams says, when we move away from home and “our worlds become larger, our perspectives become different, and it’s hard to find a commonality beyond shared history.”

Still, all those issues aside, Adams stresses that early adulthood is a most opportune time to try to revise a parental relationship — not by changing who you are, but by finding a new way to connect. “Because it’s this time, rather than the past 20 years, that will determine the relationship you’ll have with each other for the rest of your lives,” she says. “So while rent-a-mom is great, it’s not going to necessarily replicate what it is you’re seeking.”

(Top photo: Nina Keneally)

Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? Email us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com.