Hello friends,
I watch too much YouTube. In the last 12 months, this mild addiction has led me to notice something both bemusing and foreboding: the rise of the term parentpreneur among productivity and hustle influencers.
A bunch of these folks (all men) have moved on from 4am/cold-plunge/Stoicism content and we’re now watching the same people who - having had kids - are now talk about blending sleep regression and toddler logistics with six-figure lifestyle businesses.
Parentpreneur is not a new term, but its comeback says something real about how identity is shifting and about how neither "parent" nor "entrepreneur" alone are enough these days.
Below, thoughts on why this is happening and why it's more dangerous than it looks. Plus, I've one new concept and three frameworks that might just relieve you of the constant pressure to conform (whether you're a parent, you employ parents, or you work alongside them).
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WHAT IS IT?
Matt D'Avella, Jay Clouse, Ryan Holiday… even if these names do not mean much to you, they mean a lot to upwardly mobile young men looking to optimise both their income streams and their feeling of self-worth.
As influencers go, they’re not the worst by any means. They’re on the minimalism, Stoicism, just-good-enough end of things (as opposed to the toxic productivity end of things). But they are the thin edge of the wedge.
As we see more and more of these creators time out into parenthood (buoyed of course by some decent AdSense over the years), we’ll see more and more creators self-identify as parentpreneurs, a portmanteau combining parent + entrepreneur.
The lineage of the word tells us a lot about what's going on.
"Mompreneur" was seemingly coined in 1994 (hmu if you find an older occurrence) by two women writing a guide for mothers starting home businesses. It was controversial from day one, like when your granddad says "lady doctor.”
(It reads to me like a pre-emptive apology: “Hey, before you judge me for not being dedicated enough, here's my excuse...”)
And "Dadpreneur", of course, never caught on. (Funny that).
Some thirty years later, parentpreneur is back and gender-neutralised. Women got a diminishing nickname in 1994 and plenty hated it. Men get the dignified version decades later, and build entire vlog verticals for their six-figure lifestyle businesses around it instead.
So, what's really going here?
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WHEN THINGS FALL APART
I coach a lot of people using the Japanese concept of ikigai. It's deeply misunderstood. Many people use it to try and build a career that ticks four boxes: something you love, something you're good at, something the world needs, something you can get paid for.
But that's not the point of ikigai. The point is to have some version of each of those things somewhere in your life. Not all four, all the time, in one professional vocation.
The parentpreneur trend runs the exact same mistake on identity itself, except it doesn't just compress four needs into one job, it rolls your whole life into one package as professional and parent. Instead of those staying what they actually are (separate but connected things you do, unevenly, for no audience), they get bundled.
The issue is, when everything you do gets rolled into one identity, there's no longer a part of you that's allowed to just be average at something without the whole thing reading as failure.
Parentpreneurs can't have an off-month as a parent while quietly having a good month at work, because they're not separate accounts anymore - they're one balance sheet, and it's always being totalled.
Worse still: being a parent, on its own, with nothing added to it, starts to feel like it isn't enough. Not because it isn’t, but because the bundling of our identities has trained us to expect more from ourselves, all the time, everywhere at once.
Women have been absorbing this exact compound standard for decades, without ever getting YouTube brand deals. Falling short of it was interpreted as failing, but men hitting the exact same compound standard now get to call it a values-driven business. Woo-hoo.
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THE FLIPSIDE
Look, it’s not all dropped ice-creams and annoying hydration breaks.
There is some good glimmering in this shift.
I, for one, am glad people are finally being (somewhat) honest on camera about the unglamorous parts of being 30 or 40-something - not just having kids, but our failing bodies, elder care, mid-life crises (multiple), constant thoughts about death (just me?).
This used to be invisible, hidden behind the skincare routine advice and aspirational bullet journaling. Destigmatising decline and caregiving is a Good Thing imho, independent of how gross the marketing layer surrounding it is.
However, the parentpreneur bundle treats your life as one objective to be optimised all at once (lifemaxxing?) and that's a problem.
In my experience (as coach, multipotentialite, and mostly-functioning human), optimising several life domains as one fused objective doesn't average out the difficulty. Nope, it just multiplies the failure points, since any one slipping drags the whole bundle down with it.
And because the domains trade off against each other (more time on your business is less time as a present parent, always), this lifemaxxing isn't simply life on hard mode. It's like playing a game in which the enemy knows your every move before you do. You're not failing at something difficult, you're failing at something impossible.
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HOW TO MAKE IT WORK
Herbert Simon coined the term “satisficing” decades ago to describe how people actually make decisions under real constraints not by optimising every variable, but by setting a "good enough" threshold for each one and stopping there.
Practically, that means listing your domains separately (parent, partner, health, career, creativity, whatever) and setting a deliberate "good enough" threshold for each one, rather than letting one undifferentiated standard hang over all of them at once.
Satisficing, therefore, can be a rational strategy for anyone operating with finite time, money, and attention. Which is *checks notes* all of us.
Parentpreneur got one thing right: our lives genuinely are holistic and interconnected. Satisficing just makes that liveable, by being honest about what each part is actually owed.
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GET STARTED
With the people I coach, I spend a lot of time on three things:
Mapping every area of their life. Lowering their expectations of what each one owes them. Examining whether those areas are in balance, in competition, or quietly missing something that would actually bring them fulfilment.
I use three frameworks to help to do this.
Level 10 Life: scores your life across its real domains, out of ten each. Useful here because it forces you to see all the domains at once, rather than fixating on whichever one's currently on fire. Good Enough for Now, Safe Enough to Try [see edition 022] sets a deliberately low bar you can actually clear today. It's satisficing's exact mechanic, basically. Ikigai, done properly: 9 reasons for being, mapped separately so you can a) get a gut check on balance and b) see what might be missing.
The important thing is not maxing the lot, but bringing them into balance. To be more evenly distributed, if you will.
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🌊 WAVE GOODBYE 🌊
I’m no expert at all this, for what it's worth. I find it far easier to help others examine this than I do to practice it myself.
In 2022, my wife and I moved country, started a business, and had a kid, more or less simultaneously. Most months, while juggling those things (plus a music and writing career, trail running habit, and the aforementioned mild YouTube addiction) I am nowhere near maxxing out.
I’m at best around a 5 or 6 out of 10, across the board.
For a long time I read that as a failure to achieve anything. Now I read it as the reality of a busy and balanced life, one - crucially - that I've chosen.
Because a 6/10 you chose is a strategy. A 6/10 that ambushes you is not, and there's a big difference in how that makes you feel about yourself.
Thanks for being here, take care.
You're doing great.
Adam
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p.s. If you were forwarded this, hello! You can subscribe over at my website.
p.p.s If you've been here for a while, thank you too! If you'd like to support my work's independence you can tip me (and I promise I will not spend it all on Star Wars Lego).
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Where else to find my work (AKA my many, many hats)
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A note on AI
AI is, in my experience, like pornography: everyone uses it, nobody is willing to say how much. My view is that it's genuinely useful to me if it speeds up the parts of writing that were always just functional (the vehicle for my ideas I guess).
But the thinking still has to happen first.
I therefore use Claude a lot to take my notes, produce structural outlines, suggest section order, compress drafts, and check whether a throughline holds. I also use it to edit, and occasionally to suggest a sentence formulation when my brain is fried and my four-year-old still won't fall asleep in the room next door. I write at least 80% of the prose, which might be less than you hoped, but hey, I'm only human. For now.
If you're curious about my process, send me your questions.
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