Ryan Reynolds said that parents today are ‘so soft’ and ‘so different’ compared to when he was growing up as a child, Daily Mail reports.
The 47-year-old actor Ryan Reynolds opened up about his and his wife Blake Lively’s parenting style at HubSpot’s INBOUND tech conference in Boston on Friday, Us Weekly reported.
Ryan Reynolds said that, nowadays, parents ‘don’t yell,’ and kids do not face ‘improvised militia’ like he experienced in his childhood.
At the event, he recalled taking a workshop on conflict resolution, which he said shifted his perspective and ‘changed my life.’
His admission comes just days after he and Lively continued their PDA tour during a romantic stroll in New York City amid claims he wants to ‘save’ her career after the drama involving her new movie, It Ends With Us.
‘I just didn’t know how to process things that I felt,’ he admitted as he explained why he was interested in taking the workshop and learning more about himself.
‘Because I [had a] scarcity mindset when I was younger,’ he continued.
‘I didn’t know how to unfold that thing in your brain that conditions you just always to win or be right.’
Ryan Reynolds added: ‘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. You can disagree and still connect.’
Even though he has learned to work through his feelings, he said his young children are still learning.
‘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 with a chuckle.
‘Parents today are so different,’ he continued.
‘We’re so soft,’ he said. ‘I don’t yell. I grew up with like — it was nuts, it was an improvised militia.’
He said that the changes with his generation’s parenting style are for the better.
‘Now it’s like, I can go look at all my resources for parenting and remind myself how to be perfectly compassionate.’
Reynolds and Lively are parents to three daughters — James, nine, Inez, seven, and four-year-old Betty — as well as one-year-old son Olin.
The longtime couple got married in September 2012.