Drew Barrymore has opened up about her struggles as a mother, how she felt unsure about her parenting skills in her early days.
Barrymore confessed in a recent episode. Chicks in the office. podcast that she often “felt like a failure” while raising her two daughters. Barrymore shares Olive, 10, and Frankie, 8, with ex-husband Will Kopelman.
“All the parents who have all this, and they have hygiene and nutrition and schedules and boundaries, God bless you. When I had kids, I didn’t know any of that,” ‘ he said.
“I didn’t have a blueprint and I felt like a huge failure,” the blonde actress continued. “I felt really overwhelmed and like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing… I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m going to have to learn on the job’.”
Barrymore, who hosts her own talk show, shared that she understands how much things have changed since she grew up. At one point he joked that parents would leave their children “eating rocks in the driveway for three hours and no one cared.”
“That led to resilience — and now we’re like, helicopter parenting and coddling and, you know, watching everything.”
Barrymore encouraged parents to admit that they don’t always know what to do — and that it’s as “funny” as it is sometimes “embarrassing.”
“It’s funny, when my kids were little I wasn’t very forgiving of myself and now that they’re almost – Frankie’s about 9 and Olive’s like 10, it’s turned into something very different and I’m having the best time ever,” she continued. ., adding that he has finally “learned the limits.”
However, Barrymore stated that she still has moments of doubt, adding that she is still “broken” and is working on being “more patient, more kind and more rational”.
The 50 First Dates actress added, “I’m a work in progress, I had to learn how to parent myself, but that parenting style wasn’t working for my kids.” “It was a lot of survival and, you know, not what I would want for my kids.”
Barrymore currently co-parents her daughters with ex-husband Will Koppelman after the two divorced in 2016.