When my son was born last August, I decided to treat him like any other new gadget in the house: I would refuse to read any kind of instruction manual and instead play with him - using a system of trial and error - until I discovered how to get him to perform key functions. In hindsight, it was a mistake.

There are a number of crucial differences between a gadget and small human being, one of the most important being the lack of any comprehensible menu system. Oh, and when you're fiddling with your new 80in plasma TV, it doesn't scream at you in a way that suggests it has only a few seconds to live.

My wife had the opposite attitude. For example, if you search for the word “baby” on amazon.com, it comes up with 412,727 books. My wife bought these books. All of them. She assimilated so much data, she became paralysed. So that was when we hired a baby nurse.

To be honest, I didn't really know what a baby nurse was until one turned up on our doorstep. I did know this, however: LA is baby nurse capital. It was here that the late British baby nurse Tracy Hogg looked after the newborns of Jodie Foster and Cindy Crawford and was able to write a bestselling book, Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, and charge her clients $1,000 a day. Even now, the British baby nurses in LA have a stranglehold on the market, although most of them charge only a third of Hogg's old prices. That's still expensive, mind you.

Which is why we made some calls and flew over a friend's Trinidadian baby nurse from Brooklyn instead.

It turns out that in America a baby nurse - also known as a postpartum “doula”, if they're not a registered nurse - fills a role similar to that of a midwife in Britain.

If you give birth at an NHS hospital, however, they send over a midwife to your house afterwards to see how your baby's doing. If you give birth at an American hospital, they send over an invoice afterwards to see how your credit's doing. The US healthcare system can be like that: first-rate, but ruthless. And without money, you're often on your own.

So our baby nurse, Myrna, lived with us for a few weeks, and turned out to be worth every cent. If the baby was an Apple laptop, Myrna was our Genius Bar.

But baby nurses are old hat now. The market for them has grown so much, the job has been split into a dozen specialised fields. The other day my wife was at a shoe store and bumped into Isla Fisher, the actress and wife of Sacha Baron Cohen, who said they had just hired a “sleep consultant” to put their newborn back on schedule.

Maybe we needed a sleep consultant? Our son was waking up every other hour, after all. We called Myrna, and Trinidadian wisdom was dispensed: “You dun need no ‘sleep consultant',” she thundered. “Ah'll tell you right now the problem: he a very naughty boy.” Like I said, worth every cent.

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