Parents teach us many things including how to be a parent. We can learn from their mistakes, sure, but we can also learn a lot from the things they got right. We asked successful entrepreneurs and creatives to open up to us about their parents and what they felt their parents got right.

Sharon Riche

My heros in life are my loving parents who I adored. My dad was a hidden child during the Holocaust. I learned from a very young age it was a miracle my dad survived and our lives were a gift never to be taken for granted. Read More>>

Seth Sypko

My childhood was interesting in a sense that my parents were both unconventional beings who chose to surround themselves with artists, free thinkers and various fringe dwellers. I was always encouraged to engage, to ask questions and to check out what the scene was. Read More>>

Megan Samuels

My parents instilled in my having a strong work ethic and drive to continue learning and growing in my career and as a person. That is something that I am grateful for and that I continue integrating into my work as a therapist. Read More>>

Kedrin Meehan

My parents were both in the medical field and truly passionate about their work — but the honest truth is, they were rarely home. I was largely raised by a nanny. And as a kid, you notice that. What it gave me though was this relentless drive. I’ve had a job since I was a teenager. Read More>>

Dario Forzato

As a parent of two wonderful young kids myself, I find myself thinking about this question more and more lately. My parents weren’t musicians—actually, no one in my family was, or even is today. They loved music as listeners, but they could have easily been skeptical about me pursuing it as a career. Read More>>

Cat Palmer

My paternal grandparents raised me, and one thing they absolutely got right was giving me the freedom to be fully, unapologetically myself. They didn’t try to shape me into who they thought I should be—they let me figure that out on my own. I think a lot of parents, often without meaning to, place their own expectations and ideas onto their kids. Read More>>

Emily Ellis

I was a child of the 80s. It was a wild time of madly cycling home by the time the streetlights came on, running through the neighborhood catching giant grasshoppers with friends, and mixing up wild scallion and acorn ‘soup’ in an old cat food can to pretend to live in the wilds of the neighborhood park. Read More>>

Lauren Wise

If we are talking about what they did right, we’d be here a while—they are still my ultimate sounding boards for business ideas and, without a doubt, my biggest cheerleaders. But if I had to boil it down, they each gave me a distinct half of the exact skill set I use today as an editor and entrepreneur. Read More>>

Madison Bradshaw

This is such a funny question because my parents and I have the ongoing joke that they deprived me and my childhood was so hard because they were the “mean parents”. This joke came about because my parents were always very serious about having good work ethic and earning things and not being handed things. Read More>>