With her two kids now well into their teenage years, Gwenyth Paltrow has shared what she believes to be the parenting secret that helped her avoid ‘the horrible teenage’ years as her kids was growing up.
Gwenyth Paltrow may be an A-list celebrity, with her work dominating Netflix's top hits and drawing in wide audiences, but her life off screen and at home is much like any other parent's.
The star shares two children with Coldplay front-man Chris Martin, the uniquely named 19-year-old Apple, and 17-year-old Moses. The couple split up back in 2014 after nine years of marriage, deciding to try co-parenting their children who were just 10- and eight-years-old at the time.
The family continue to rely on co-parenting with the style working perfectly for both Gwenyth and Chris' hectic lifestyles in the spotlight. But despite the divorce, which Gwenyth told PEOPLE Magazine recently she was worried would negatively affect her kids, and both the kids now being well into their teens, a notoriously angsty time, life has pretty much been a breeze for the family and Gwenyth puts it all down to her laid back parenting style.
Sharing her parenting secret, Gwenyth revealed to PEOPLE, "I have been so lucky with my teens. We had, probably when Apple, I would say, was about 13, we had a year where I was like, 'Oh wow, okay,' but actually my kids have been - I kind of didn't have the horrible teen thing, I think because I've always been very, very honest with my kids and I think I've always empowered them with a little bit more freedom and responsibility than they thought they were ready for.
"They've treated it with reverence. I've always said, 'I don't need to give you a curfew unless you give me a reason to give you a curfew,' kind of thing. They're responsible and they've never done anything too crazy."
She added, "I really loved having teenagers. I mean, Apple's in her last year of her teenage years now, which is so crazy to me that she'll be 20 on her next birthday. I don't quite know how that happened!"
On top of her giving her kids 'freedom and responsibility,' Gwenyth's compassionate and well-thought out approach to her divorce, which she prioritised her children throughout, likely also gave her kids a solid foundation on which to build their trust in her, ergo giving them a more stable teenhood.
She told PEOPLE, "[Chris] and I both really did not want to have them experience the divorce as a trauma. We knew it would be hard, of course, but we didn't want them to ever feel in the middle, or that one of us was slagging off the other one."
She went on to explain the in-depth research she carried out in order to find the best way to handle her split while keeping her kids happy. "At that time, I did a very me thing, which was when I knew I wanted to get a divorce, I did this data collection of talking to adults who had been products of a broken home," she explained.
"Every single one of them said, 'I didn't care that my parents got divorced. That wasn't it. But the fact that they wouldn't speak to each other, that they couldn't both sit at a dinner table for my birthday...' They said that was the most awful thing. You could see they held it with so much hurt and anger. I was like, 'That's what I'm never going to do.' And we really didn't."
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