As a mom to a precocious and spirited daughter, I can say that I was nervous when my midwife told me I was having a girl. I went through my own rebellious phase in my younger years, and have faced my fair share of challenges based on my gender—when I was pregnant it scared me to imagine my own kid going through similar experiences. Drew Barrymore recently revealed that she had a similar experience as a mom to daughters, explaining that she hopes to give her girls a more stable, happy childhood than she had.
In a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she called her daughters (who she shares with ex-husband Will Kopelman) her “North Star, my compass.” Reflecting on it, Barrymore tells Colbert that she “was put on this planet to raise girls.” But she wasn’t always so confident in her ability to mother her daughters.
Drew Barrymore Wants to Parent Her Daughters Differently
Barrymore famously grew up in a wealthy family with a long Hollywood lineage, which led to her own problems with substance abuse a very young age. Though she’s now a recovering addict, those experiences have of course influenced how she wants to bring up her own kids.
“If you don’t grow up in a perfect way with a perfect family, you fear the blueprint and you go, I want to do things differently,” she told Colbert.
Barrymore confesses that when she was pregnant with her second daughter, Frankie, “it humbled me in a way that I’ve never known.”
It’s understandable that Barrymore wasn’t always sure she would know how to be a good mother to her daughters, given her own tumultuous upbringing, but of course she rose to the occasion—even if it took some time for her to adjust. She says that while parenting made her feel “unconfident” at first, she was able to gain her confidence back after a few years. Since then parenting has become, according to Barrymore, “humorous…delicious…[and] great.”
For his part, Colbert lavished praise on Barrymore’s parenting skills, even revealing his wife’s praise of Barrymore being a “wonderful parent to her two girls.” As a dad to a daughter himself he jokes that the first thing he thought when he held her was “Oh I’ve been dumb,”—meaning that he had his priorities all wrong before his children were born.
Barrymore’s new found wisdom doesn’t mean that she has parenting totally figured out now, or that she’s a flawless mother. In fact, she openly admits what many parents probably think privately all the time: “I am imperfect but I’m going to do everything I can to do this to the best of my ability.”
