Parents and Entrepreneurs, what do they have in common? 

Parents and educators must teach how to “read”, understand, and face the world. The entrepreneurial spirit offers children and young people tools, strategies, and methods to develop and implement personal projects, to affirm their rights, interests, and needs, but also to become aware of their limits, as well as of their own talents, recognising critical issues and opportunities presented to them.

That is why we may state that parents run their families just as they were enterprises, in daily challenges to guarantee a peaceful growth and bright future of their kids where personal and life achievements along with failures and successes can make them positive changers.   

Marzario Margherita (teacher and jurist specialising in family and personal law) wrote a very interesting article L’impresa genitoriale that we may translate as “The parental enterprise”, where she shows that with the necessary adjustments, the definition of “entrepreneur” given by art. 2082 of the Italian civil code can be suitable for the most difficult job in life, parenting.

Here is the legal definition of an entrepreneur with a realistic and meaningful comparison with the parent’s role. 

An entrepreneur … – someone who has a parental authority

.. is someone who professionally exercises an organized economic activity – parenting is an activity because it involves a series of daily acts, “fulfillment of tasks” and it is “economic” not only in the etymological sense of “house rules, the art of managing and managing the things of the family”, but also because parents’ “organisation” is essential to “ensure, within the limits of their possibilities and financial resources, the living conditions necessary for the development of the child”

.. for the purpose of producing or exchanging – “producing” is “to put forward, to advance, to lead out”, which is all connatural to parenting and “exchanging” implies a relationship, parenting precisely, which generates other relationships 

.. goods or services – goods are intangible goods, the so-called relational goods, but also material goods which take the form of the obligations to maintain, instruct and educate children with moral assistance. 

In other words, being a “successful” parent and educator requires the same mindset, spirit, and skills of a successful entrepreneur to be a problem-solver, flexible, self-driven, patience and resilience, creative and passionate, a realistic goal-oriented leader, a manager, an effective listener and communicator, a time manager and so on.   

The need to support our kids in developing an entrepreneurial mindset fulfills the urgent need to educate young generations to think critically and creatively, to be resilience, to be able to face and overcome challenges and uncertainties, and, above all, to be optimistic and proactive to change their lives as well as to actively participate in their own and others’ social, human, cultural and economic changes.