Founder POV · 5 min read
Why we built Parental Leave Pro (or: what happens when a nurse practitioner and a CPA try to plan their own leave)
By Christine · Published July 1, 2026
I've spent ten years explaining medical care to patients. My husband is a CPA and a Navy veteran. It still took us three weekends at our kitchen table to figure out our own parental leave, and even then I wasn't sure we'd gotten it right.
Our daughter arrived this summer. When we started planning my leave, I did what I usually do when something feels complicated. I made a list. I opened three tabs. I told my husband we'd have it sorted by Sunday.
Sunday came and went. So did the next one.
Here's the thing nobody explains cleanly. Parental leave in the U.S. isn't one benefit. It's a stack of benefits, run by different people, paid from different sources, on different timelines, with different rules. Even the language is confusing. FMLA, PFML, PFL, STD, PTO. Some acronyms sound like a paycheck. Some sound like a doctor's note. Most people think they're all the same thing.
I live in Connecticut. Connecticut has a state Paid Family Leave program that pays up to $1,016 a week for 12 weeks. That's meaningful money. I'm a full-time employee, so I'm eligible. I figured that was the answer. Twelve weeks at almost a thousand a week. Done.
Except that wasn't the answer.
The state PFML program is one piece. My employer's policy is another piece. Short-term disability is a third piece. And each one interacts with the others in ways that change how much I actually take home, when the money hits, and how many weeks I can be home with the baby.
Take employer policy. When I asked HR whether my employer's paid parental leave stacks on top of the state's PFML, or whether they run at the same time and cancel each other out, she said "let me get back to you." Three days later she came back with a page of legal language that neither of us fully understood. I called her again. She said she'd double-check with our benefits carrier. It took eleven days and four emails.
The answer, when it finally came, mattered by about eight thousand dollars.
Eight thousand dollars is real. That's daycare, or a car repair, or the first three months of formula and diapers. And I'm the person who's supposed to be able to navigate this. If I couldn't get a straight answer without four escalations, what happens to the people who don't have a nurse practitioner in the house, or a CPA at the kitchen table, or the confidence to keep asking?
I started keeping notes on my phone every time I hit a wall. Here's a partial list.
Nobody at my OB's office knew what CT Paid Leave was. They pointed me at HR.
HR pointed me at the state agency website.
The state agency website was accurate but written for someone who already knew what they were looking for.
Short-term disability isn't the same thing as paid family leave, but you have to file both if you want the full income coverage during your medical recovery weeks. Nobody told me this. I found it in a footnote on a benefits FAQ.
The order you file matters. If you file for PFML too early, they deny you. Too late, and you lose weeks of pay you could have claimed.
Your partner's leave isn't automatically coordinated with yours. If you both work for W-2 employers, you might be able to sequence your leaves so the baby has a parent home for twenty-four weeks instead of twelve. But nobody at either of our employers ran that math for us. We ran it ourselves.
By the third weekend I had a spreadsheet with four tabs. One for the state program, one for my employer, one for STD, one for my husband's self-employment income and how that changed our household picture. My husband is a CPA and he built the tax layer. I'm not a CPA and I still had to google half of what I was reading.
At one point I put the pen down and said, out loud, "there is no way most parents do this."
That was the moment.
Because he's a builder, my husband said, "so let's build it."
That's how Parental Leave Pro started. Not as a business idea. As a spreadsheet we couldn't stop rebuilding, and then as a website that could run the math faster than either of us, and then as a plan that let us send friends the link when they got pregnant.
The version you're looking at today does what we needed our spreadsheet to do. It asks about your state, your employer, your wages, your due date. It checks your eligibility across federal FMLA, state PFML, short-term disability, and your employer's own policy. It shows you the dollar amount you'll actually see. It writes the email you send to HR. And if you're planning as a couple, it coordinates your leaves so you don't leave weeks of coverage on the table.
Most of it's free. The intake is free. The eligibility check is free. Every state guide is free. The specific dollar estimate, the personalized plan, and the AI-drafted HR email are on the paid tier because they're the parts that took us the longest to figure out, and because they're the ones that pay for themselves the first time you use them. Full refund inside fourteen days if the plan doesn't help you.
We built the tool we wished existed. I don't want anyone else to spend three weekends at their kitchen table figuring out what should have been in an email from HR.
If you're expecting, or you're planning to be, and you don't want to be where we were in month five of my pregnancy: the free intake takes about ten minutes. It'll tell you which programs apply to you and where the money is. That's the part I wish I'd had.
We're a small team. It's my husband and me. If you have a question or something's confusing, email us. I answer.
Christine is a Nurse Practitioner with over a decade of surgical and trauma critical care experience, a military spouse, and a first-time expecting mom. She lives in Connecticut and co-founded Parental Leave Pro with her husband Steven, a Navy veteran and CPA.
Related state guides
This post refers to these states. Each guide has the current 2026 rules, rates, and filing deadlines: