The football transfer window is peak gossip. Much speculation has focused on the future of Arsenal’s Myles Lewis-Skelly, including whether his mother, Marcia Lewis, is talking to other clubs.
“Arsenal fans need to chill out [about] his mum,” said pundit and former Arsenal player Ian Wright. The young star’s mum is fascinating. She previously worked for banks as a training specialist but, after discovering her son’s talents, studied for an MSc in football business and registered for a Fifa agent licence to better understand the industry.
She subsequently set up an organisation to help navigate parents through sports business and negotiated contracts on her son’s behalf. Other parents have made similar moves into their child’s industry.
Twenty-six-year-old Curry Barker, feted by Hollywood for writing and directing Obsession, the horror movie that has reportedly become one of the year’s most profitable films (baffling to me), has been followed by his father. Jeff Barker’s announcement that he was making a short psychological horror film, Medium Rare, led one online publication to ask if the project would “stand on its own merit or will audiences decide he’s just riding his son’s coattails?”
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Comedian and actor Jack Whitehall has spoken of his parents, who “became famous off the back of me”. Another comedian, Romesh Ranganathan, has turned his mother, Shanti, into a star by featuring her in his television programmes and on his podcast.
Hollywood is rife with nepo babies (also known as nepotism babies): actors, directors and singers whose careers have been helped by famous parents and who come in for some flak. Gwyneth Paltrow (daughter of actress Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow) has talked about being “extraordinarily lucky to be given opportunities early on, probably partly because I’m one of the original nepo babies”.
For the first and last time, allow me to compare myself to Paltrow. My dad was a journalist. Growing up around newspapers and hearing him discuss work was a huge advantage, though I got into the FT through an advertisement in the newspaper (unthinkable today). I worried about being in his professional shadow and really only found my feet after he died more than 20 years ago.
Journalism is full of adult children who have followed their parents into the job – so too, plumbing, farming and teaching. Though it does not feel like it sometimes, parents clearly have an influence on their children, even if only by osmosis. Resentment towards nepo babies in entertainment and perhaps journalism is partly explained by entry into those jobs seeming opaque and based on connections, while policing and medicine, for example, have structured paths.
Perhaps the same goes for nepo parents? Marc Freedman, founder of Co-Generate, an organisation that brings different generations together on work and social policies, has identified cases of parents following their children into professions among those “from more modest means” than celebrities.
This trend might become more popular as working life extends and people contemplate midlife career changes, he says. The platitude that the young have much to teach may be nauseating but is not wrong. Reverse mentoring, where a senior executive learns from a junior, typically about tech and communication styles, was popularised by GE’s Jack Welch in the 1990s and has become a staple of corporate life.
One mother, a nurse, went back to medical school to become a doctor at the same time as her daughter. “The lines of motherhood became truly blurred,” she said, particularly when her daughter helped her learn to revise after so many years out of exams.
In the US, non-profit Hope Chicago offers students and their parents or guardians the opportunity to pursue postsecondary education debt free to try to help upward economic mobility for families.
One mother and daughter using the programme, Marilinet and Hailey Morales, say studying at the same time has changed their relationship, making them feel more like sisters or co-workers. Hailey has become more appreciative of why her mother pushed her at school, because she did not have the opportunity to pursue education. “It made me realise it wasn’t her trying to nag at me.”
Kelsey Ingram, who is studying cyber security at Illinois State University, says his mother Marcia returning to education to learn marketing has created friendly competition. Marcia has in turn learned from her son “not to beat yourself up if you get a B”.
Pity another bemused woman who followed her child into the police. She will, she insists, “be doing everything [possible to avoid] calling my own daughter Ma’am”.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
