This question comes up so frequently that it would be extremely appreciated if someone on the SwiftUI team or a DTS representative could chime in on this. The vast majority of sample code and documentation assumes a view model can be created without any parameters to its initializer, which is not always the case. And in the Fruta example app a single Model is used for the entire application, which really isn't realistic for larger scale applications. I've resorted to the following design pattern but I remain unsure if this is considered a "correct" way to initialize an @StateObject property: struct ParentView: View { var body: some View { ChildView(viewModel: ChildViewModel(someValue: "foo")) } } class ChildViewModel: ObservableObject { init(someValue: Any) { } } struct ChildView: View { @StateObject var viewModel: ChildViewModel } This pattern appears to work correctly and doesn't require the small "hack" of using the underscore to initialize the @StateObject, which appears to be discouraged based on my reading of the documentation: StateObject.init(wrappedValue:) // You don’t call this initializer directly. Instead, declare a property with the  // @StateObject attribute in a View, App, or Scene, and provide an initial value: struct MyView: View { @StateObject var model = DataModel() }