The Center for Parental Leave Leadership is the first consulting and coaching company devoted exclusively to helping our nation’s families, employees, employers, and companies improve their parental leave policy and practice. We think it is high time.

The Center for Parental Leave Leadership was founded to honor the work of over four decades of advocates, activists, groundbreakers, and trailblazers, as well as keep a promise that I made to myself over a decade ago after the birth of my first child.

At that time, I found myself battered by the unexpected physical trauma of an unplanned cesarean, broken by the sucker punch of severe postpartum mental health issues, and shocked that I was so ill prepared. I had not made a single contingency plan for my work. As a career driven and ambitious woman, and as the primary breadwinner for my family, I had committed to being back on the job just three weeks after giving birth.

When I was simply a working person, this had seemed completely logical, but I had just become a working parent and I had to face the reality that what I had set up for myself was now impossible. On one particularly dark night, I sat crying through the agony of failed breastfeeding and the sting of loneliness too many new mothers experience. That night, I swore to myself that if I got through that time, I would do whatever I could to make sure no woman ever felt what I was feeling. It is a promise that has driven me ever since.

Today, the Center for Parental Leave Leadership comes from a much brighter and inclusive place: a place of knowing that when smart people collaborate and work toward a shared vision, we can truly transform our country, our companies, and the lived experience of all our working parents—both women and men. We are already seeing it happen.

Our work is not about improving life just for our parents or improving profits just for our companies—it is about both. We are working toward a new social contract. Today, our work lives and our family lives are intricately combined; we are not one without the other. It is by supporting working parents that companies gain strength; and, it is by being supported that working parents develop into their best selves, which they then bring back into their companies and their families.

Our approach is research-based and experience driven. We rely on concrete numbers, valid insights, and measurable outcomes to help you assess where you and your company are on the Parental Leave Leadership spectrum.

The data tells us that programs designed for individual parents alone are not nearly as effective as systemic interventions. Our holistic approach not only helps retain individuals, it helps drive employee development and business growth. Our unique approach to data collection and analysis will show you how to use your own company’s data to make your business case too.

We help employers understand where their parental leave process and culture is working for them and where it isn’t. Then we give them tools to improve it. To do that, we partner with companies to craft customized and targeted policy, research, and training.

Our expert policy team knows policy inside and out. Some of them have written state policy, others have been behind its passage, and most have been supporting companies to write their own policies for years.

Our research team is full of PhD’s who love working with companies to analyze their current data collection methods and identify any missed opportunities or gaps. Collecting the right data helps us customize solutions and tell the story that will help make the changes that employees, teams, and companies can get behind.

Our training team literally built the field and wrote the book. It is not an overstatement to say we are all obsessed with making sure your company becomes a parental leave leader full of employees singing your praises from the rooftops (and on Glassdoor!).

Becoming a parent — for the first time or the fifth — is one of the most transformative moments in an individual’s personal and professional life. For many in the U.S., it has also been a disaster. It doesn’t have to be this way. In our work we have identified ten clear touchpoints that need to be navigated well throughout the full parental leave transition. These mile-markers create a clear playbook that, once known, can significantly ease anxiety and limit wasted resources to ensure a smooth and joyful transition.

When parents are given help to navigate this crossroads with clear and loving support it has positive and lifelong implications for their careers, families, and personal lives. Our holistic approach helps new parents transition between, and then integrate, often opposing sides of themselves – on more career-identified and the other more family-identified. With the appropriate support working parents can move forward with confidence and clarity to create the next phase of their life, while deepening their commitment to their own values and career goals.

Our RETAIN Coaching program uses leadership development and employee support to engage sustained commitment through collaboration, open communication, and action planning. We envision a world where the transition from working person to working parent is a transparent, supported, and replicable process that allows employees to thrive.

We are building a vast network of professionally trained coaches and consultants to work with thousands of companies to fundamentally improve the parental leave transition experience for millions of working parents. We believe that this work is too big and too important for us to accomplish on our own.

Our coaching model is the connective tissue that allows true transformative change at scale by bringing in the wealth of diverse experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives needed to make this work. Our network of RETAIN certified coaches are fueled by the deeply personal experience of their own parental leave transition and are passionate about making this change with working parents and at the corporate level.

We empower coaches and consultants to drive systemic change within client companies by providing coach certification and a tested program of manager training and new parent coaching around the parental leave timeframe. Using our robust education portal and its evidence and experience-based tools, coaches are able to grow their practice and support new parents, managers, and teams to create a healthier, more manageable transition experience for all.