Ryan Reynolds opened up about the parenting style that he and actress Blake Lively practice with their kids, plus how the way he processes his emotions has evolved over time.
The Deadpool & Wolverine star, 47, spoke at HubSpot’s INBOUND tech conference in Boston where the actor revealed how a workshop he took changed his entire life and especially how he parents.
“I took a workshop on conflict resolution, and that changed my entire life,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to process things that I felt. Because I [had a] scarcity mindset when I was younger. I didn’t know how to unfold that thing in your brain that conditions you just always to win or be right.”
“Something I love about [conflict resolution], and I know this is not very fancy, but what I love about it is that you can meet somebody where they are, and you don’t have to be right or wrong,” Reynolds added. “You can disagree and still connect.”
He compared his mindset growing up to that of his children, noting that his kids won’t have that to work to process their feelings with such difficulty.
“I have four kids and so far, none of them seem to have that [scarcity mindset], partly because they were born on ‘Easy Street,'” he said.
“Parents today are so different. We’re so soft,” he continued. “I don’t yell. I grew up with like — it was nuts, it was an improvised militia.”
Reynolds went on to explain how things have changed for the better since he was a kid.
“Now it’s like, I can go look at all my resources for parenting and remind myself how to be perfectly compassionate,” he admitted.
Back in 2022, he joked that his three daughters, Betty, Ines, and James are so “wild,” that he sometimes thinks they have “rabies.”
“I’m like any parent. I’ll have a moment where I’ll just snap,” he said. “It’s not so much what you do in the moment that’s interesting, it’s what you do afterwards.”
He credits Lively for how he has molded himself into the father he is today.
“Blake, full disclosure, really showed me how to do all this,” he told David Letterman on Netflix’s My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
Asked if he would feel anxious if Lively left him to look after the children on his own while she visited family, Reynolds joked: “I would, first off, never let her go visit her family. No, yeah, that is illegal. That’s kidnapping.”
