Dr. Baila Drucker is the creator of the Loving Leadership parenting model and the founder of the Loving Leadership Academy. For over two decades, she has been providing sure and steady guidance to individuals and families, helping them find their way back to themselves and to each other. She is a fierce advocate for our children, parents and families at a time when it seems like there are so many forces and systems working against them.
Our Loving Leader
Baila chose to become a therapist because of her own trauma history and a desire to make meaning of it by being of service to others. She deliberately pursued graduate and doctoral studies in social work because of the discipline’s person-in-environment, systems-based approach—a holistic framework that is now foundational to both her clinical work and the Loving Leadership model.
A Calling Rooted in Purpose
Early Work with Vulnerable Populations
Baila’s career began in service of the most vulnerable. She worked at a legal aid agency supporting survivors of domestic violence and in both inpatient and outpatient community mental health settings, where she cared for individuals navigating chronic and debilitating mental illness.
She went on to join the clinical leadership team at a nonprofit, 120-bed addiction treatment center known as “the last house on the block”—a place where people arrived after exhausting all other options. There, she developed and implemented a trauma-informed addiction protocol, ran the family therapy department, and trained emerging therapists. Facilitating intensive family retreats became her flow state, and she witnessed the transformative potential of family systems work in real time. It was in those moments that her passion fully aligned with her purpose.
Baila became increasingly focused on how to apply powerful healing tools earlier in the lifecycle—before issues escalated into full-blown crises. This led her to co-found innovative programs like Sababa Surf Camp, blending clinical tools with the resilience-building magic of surfing, and Project:Camp, which delivers trauma-informed care to children impacted by natural disasters to prevent the onset of PTSD.
Shifting the Focus Upstream
Her desire to intervene even further upstream led her to adolescent treatment, an experience that proved both defining and eye-opening. She was exposed to the dark underbelly of the troubled teen industry, where she saw parents being told they were unfit to care for their own children, and children being hyper-pathologized and over-treated. Rather than quality, consistent care, she saw fear-based messaging and dismal outcomes—what some professionals call “the revolving door of treatment.”
This experience galvanized her to do things differently. She left the system—and committed herself entirely to resourcing and empowering parents.
A Defining Turning Point
That’s when Loving Leadership was born. In its earliest form, it was called *Edge of Agency Parenting*, a bold, parent-centric approach to children’s mental health. Parents reached out to Baila in crisis, and she took a stand: she wouldn’t work with their child until the parents committed to at least two months of coaching. It wasn’t a popular or “marketable” position—but it was aligned with everything she knew about family systems and healing.
She told parents, with compassion and conviction, that she couldn’t “fix their kid.” The real work began with them. And they showed up—with courage, vulnerability, and willingness. They did the inner work. And the results spoke for themselves.
Hundreds of families walked their children out of treatment pipelines. They broke free from over-identification with long lists of diagnoses. They emerged from cycles of chronic crisis. And they became stronger, more connected, and more resilient than ever before.
The Birth of Loving Leadership
From One Family at a Time to a Global Movement
Grateful parents began to call Baila “the parent whisperer” and “a magician,” though they often wished they’d had access to her work sooner. So she expanded the model to support parents at all stages and in all kinds of families—not just those in crisis or with mental health problems.
She launched the Loving Leadership Academy to make these life-changing tools widely accessible, not just to those who could afford private coaching, helping parents everywhere lead with confidence, clarity, and calm.
Loving Leadership is a parenting model that empowers and equips parents to be the leaders their children need. It challenges the pervasive messaging that tells parents they are failing and their children are broken. These messages come from schools, clinicians, doctors, and social media—and they leave parents afraid and unsure, undermining their ability to lead.
Children pick up on this fear and insecurity. What they actually need is to feel that their parents are “bigger, stronger, smarter”—a safe and steady source of containment. Loving Leadership restores parents’ authority, which in turn restores children’s sense of safety and stability.
Rather than labeling and pathologizing behavior, Loving Leadership teaches us to understand children in context. Grounded in systems theory and a person-in-environment approach, it sees parenting as an inside-out job. Parents begin by building their *Personal Authority*, then move into the practical tools of *Loving Leadership*. It’s an ongoing dance between internal reflection and external application.
What is Loving Leadership?
A Principles-Based Roadmap for Parenting
Loving Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all script. It is a principles-based framework that helps parents make thoughtful, confident decisions across all situations. It interrupts reactive parenting patterns—whether inherited or oppositional—and supports families in designing the kind of home and relationships they truly want.
Empowered parents raise resilient children. Loving Leadership fosters independence, mastery, and emotional strength by helping children face life’s inevitable ups and downs with confidence. It invites parents to hold the tension between protecting and preparing—to support growth through struggle without overstepping or over-rescuing.
At its core, Loving Leadership honors the dignity of children, the wisdom of parents, and the power of families to grow, evolve, and thrive together.