Why Companies Have Started to Coach New Parents

When Lindsay Abt was pregnant with her first child, she remembers reading a book for expectant mothers that cautioned against making too many big life changes at once. She went ahead and made three anyway.

“I broke all of the rules,” she said. Not only did she take on a job with greater responsibility — she is a partner at the accounting firm Ernst & Young — she had to move her family to Florida from New York to do it. She moved in July 2014 while her husband stayed behind to sell their house. Her son was born that October.