Ballerina Farm’s Daniel and Hannah Neeleman ‘Split Everything’ in Their House: ‘Very Much Coparenting’

Ballerina Farm’s Daniel and Hannah Neeleman have a system that works for them in their house.

“I just have one brother who’s seven years younger than me, and then I have seven sisters. So I was kind of raised by my sisters and my parents. They did a lot of the domestic stuff. Dad went to work every day. Mom stayed home with us kids. I just kind of thought that’s how family works,” Daniel told GQ in an interview published on Tuesday, April 7. “When I met Hannah, this all got kind of turned upside down because we both come from very entrepreneurial families.”

He continued, “We both knew we wanted to start our own company, but I just imagined that I would go to work and Hannah would want to stay home with the kids. When she said, ‘No, we’re going to work together. You’re not going to leave me home with the kids,’ my mind had this epiphany moment. That’s kind of the route we’ve taken and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m home, Hannah and I split everything. We split all the cleaning, we split all the laundry, we split all the diapers, we split all the meals. I mean, it’s very much coparenting, co-everything in our house.”

When asked whether there’s something he contributes to the household that he never imagined doing, Daniel replied, “I remember Grandpa always saying, ‘Grandma did the diapers and I did the barf.’ I think there’s been a generational change there.”

“The roles are very much interchangeable,” he said. “Now, I would say as far as the cooking goes, I definitely didn’t see myself cooking as much as I do, but a big part of that has to do with the fact that Hannah whisked me off to cookery school two years ago and that kind of changed a dynamic in our family because I never was one to cook.”

He continued, “I learned a lot of it was just lack of training. You’ve never been taught how to do these things, and so it doesn’t make sense to go out and do them. Where Hannah takes to cooking really easily, I really benefited with some formal training in the kitchen. It wasn’t something I was going to figure out by experimentation.”

Daniel and Hannah manage their Ballerina Farm business while being influencers and raising their nine children. The pair welcomed their youngest daughter, whom they have yet to name, in March.

“This is kind of a big milestone for us,” Daniel said of their ninth baby’s arrival. “Nine feels surreal because Hannah’s one of nine, I’m one of nine. I think we always kind of had this magical nine number in our head that we wanted to get to. Now, who knows? Are we done? Is there more? We don’t know.”

He continued, “I mean, it’s still too early to decide that, but right now we just feel really blessed that we’ve had these nine healthy babies and each one of them has been so unique, so special, and have contributed so much to the family in their own individual ways. When we were expecting this ninth one, everyone was just so excited to see what’s this baby going to be like? What’s their personality? What’s their hair color?”

Despite the internet attempting to label Hannah as a “trad wife” — i.e., someone who abides by traditional roles in the household — she has publicly pushed back on the idea.

“I don’t necessarily identify with it,” Neeleman, 34, told The Sunday Times in a 2024 interview. “Because we are traditional in the sense that it’s a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we’re paving a lot of paths that haven’t been paved before.”

When asked whether Daniel was the head of their household, he replied, “No. We’re co-CEOs,” to which Hannah agreed, “Yeah. We are.”