We didn’t enter this field. We built it.
We created parental leave coaching and consulting as a discipline. CPLL exists to bring that work to organizations at scale so we can fundamentally improve parental leave in the United States and beyond.
Where it began.
In 2006, Dr. Amy Beacom was a doctoral student at Columbia University studying executive coaching, leadership, adult development, and organizational change. She was also a new mother who had just navigated her own parental leave with almost no preparation, no framework, and no one telling her what to expect. When physical and mental health issues hit, with only three weeks of unpaid leave, she made a promise that she would do something so that no other parent ever felt the way she did.
That experience planted a question she couldn’t let go of: why does one of the most significant transitions in a person’s professional and personal life have absolutely no infrastructure around it?
She started building the answer.
Drawing on decades of research and her own hard-won experience, Dr. Beacom began developing what would become the RETAIN Coaching™ methodology. When Australia passed the Workplace Gender Equality Act in 2012, which required companies to submit annual gender equality reports to the government, she was asked to pilot test her approach at the country’s largest retail employer.
Results proved without a doubt, RETAIN Coaching worked. In 2014 she founded the Center for Parental Leave Leadership to bring that work to organizations at scale. The first client was Microsoft, who was leading the United States by expanding their policy and looking to improve their practice using RETAIN’s unique parent/manager aligned approach. For nine years they worked together to enhance the employee experience and make lives better.
Those early programs proved something important: parental leave could be transformed from a retention risk into a leadership development opportunity—not just for parents, but for their managers, their teams, and the organizations that employed them.
Through that foundation, CPLL grew. Dr. Beacom’s work codified an entirely new discipline. She developed the RETAIN Coaching methodology, built comprehensive manager and team training, created the Parental Leave Transition Assessment (PLTA)™—the only validated measurement tool in the field—established the first and only certification for parental leave coaches, and co-authored The Parental Leave Playbook (Wiley, 2021), the first book on parental leave coaching, AND shared her thought leadership with millions of people through conferences, interviews, articles, podcasts, and more to convince our country that it was long past time to improve parental leave—and that it could be done easily and affordably.
Along the way, CPLL’s trailblazing work created the vocabulary, tools, timelines, and frameworks now widely adopted across HR, DEI, and caregiver support programs. Much of it without attribution. We don’t say that with bitterness. We say it because it’s proof that the field needed what we built.
Where we are today.
Today, the Center for Parental Leave Leadership operates through two connected brands: CPLL, the parent company and B2B consulting brand, and RETAIN Coaching, the methodology and digital platform and app that puts the framework directly into the hands of parents, managers, HR professionals, and coaches worldwide.
Together, they serve organizations of every size and sector—from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies, nonprofits to religious institutions, startups to solo entrepreneurs—because parental leave affects every workplace, regardless of industry or headcount.
We’re proud to still be the only provider offering the depth, rigor, and systemic impact of a truly complete, research-based and heart-centered methodology. Others have entered this field, and we welcome them, this transition deserves more champions
After 20 years, we’ll keep leading. And we’re more certain than ever that the best is still ahead.
This is personal. It always has been.
We believe no parent should ever navigate one of the most sacred transitions of their life alone. We exist so families can bond, thrive, and stay intact AND so organizations don’t lose the people—and the knowledge, culture, and continuity—they’ve invested in. When parental leave goes wrong, everyone pays. When it goes right, everyone benefits. That’s what we’re here for.
And when this moment is handled well, it doesn’t just change one experience. It changes workplaces, families, communities, and ultimately, our country.
The principles behind everything we do.
Evidence over assumption.
We listen as carefully as we measure. The research tells us where to look. The people navigating this transition tell us what we’re actually seeing. Our work lives at the intersection.
Improve the whole system.
One stakeholder being supported while the others are ignored isn’t a solution, it’s a delay of an inevitable breakdown. Parents, managers, teams, and HR moving together is the way to make it work.
Real change over surface-level compliance.
Because ticking boxes doesn’t change lives or organizational culture. Approaching this timeframe with intention, strategy, and genuine care does.
Human dignity
at work.
Everyone navigating this transition—including parents, managers, teams, and HR—deserves support that honors the magnitude of what they’re doing.
Meet the founder behind our work.
Dr. Amy Beacom has spent more than two decades building the field of parental leave coaching and consulting from the ground up. Her story is the story of CPLL.