Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about her experience as a stepmom to husband Brad Falchuk’s two kids.
While taking the mic at the Visionary Women’s International Women’s Day Summit on March 6, Paltrow asked if anyone in the audience was a stepmother, according to People.
When the crowd applauded, she said, “Yeah, it’s a b—h, right, guys? No, I actually, I really like to talk about this because it’s one of my biggest learnings as a human being. And my area of growth personally came from the initial difficult relationship I had with my stepkids, and now they’re like my kids.”
Paltrow noted that the path to get there was “really rough.”
“It’s almost like you have to embody the spirit of the sun and just give and not expect anything back,” she said of what it’s like to be a stepparent.
“I just learned to try to just keep shining like the sun and never keeping score,” she added.
Paltrow shares her two kids, Apple, 19, and Moses, 17, with her ex-husband, Chris Martin. Her kids also have a stepmom in Dakota Johnson, who recently said she loves the kids “with all my heart.”
Falchuk is a father of two kids, Isabella, 18, and Brody, 17, whom he shares with his ex-wife, Suzanne Bukinik.
While speaking with Falchuk on a September 2022 episode of her “Goop” podcast, Paltrow said she fumbled as a stepparent at first.
“There’s just no playbook for how to do it and nobody says, ‘Hey, you’re going to be a stepmother,’” she said. “There’s this archetypal evil stepmother and this inference that … it’s going to be this fraught thing.”
However, Paltrow said she started to see things differently once she told herself: “F— it, these are my kids. I’m not going to be scared to discipline them or draw the boundary.”“That’s really what shifted everything,” she told Falchuk.
Falchuk then recalled a time when Paltrow “yelled” at Brody, and said even though his son was “shocked,” he soon became relaxed because he realized he was being treated like “every other kid here.”
“If someone asked me for advice on it, I would just say, ‘From day one, really treat them as your kid,'” Paltrow said.
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