Ryan Reynolds thinks parents today are “soft” compared to his youth.
“Parents today are so different. We’re so soft,” the “Deadpool & Wolverine” star, 47, told the INBOUND tech conference on Friday, according to People magazine. “I don’t yell. I grew up with like – it was nuts, it was an improvised militia.”
Reynolds has spoken in the past about his difficulties relating to his father, who died of Parkinson’s disease in 2015.
“My father was a man who does not share his feelings,” he told People previously. “He was a boxer, a cop, a hard-a–. I can’t even recall ever really having a proper conversation with my father. He was a present father, never missed a football game, but he just didn’t have the capacity to feel, or at least share, the full spectrum of human emotion a bit. And pride was just so ingrained in him that it dictated almost everything that he did.”
He added, “Now it’s like, I can go look at all my resources for parenting and remind myself how to be perfectly compassionate.”
Reynolds – who shares four kids: James, 9, Inez, 7, and Betty, 4, and Olin, 1, with wife Blake Lively – told INBOUND on Friday that he recently took a conflict resolution class that “changed my entire life.”
He admitted to moderator Marcus Collins that he “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.”
A scarcity mindset is described as believing “there are limited resources, so if someone else has something, you feel there is less of that resource available for you,” according to University of Washington Medicine.
Reynolds said none of his four children seem to have a scarcity mindset, “partly because they were born on ‘Easy Street,’” he joked.
Earlier in the summer, Reynolds told People that Shawn Levy, the director of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” gave him parenting advice about sharing your losses as well as your wins with your kids.
He “actually told me something that stuck with me forever, that people tend to only talk about their wins,” Reynolds explained of Levy’s advice. “I think it’s really important for your kids in particular to know that you lose. You don’t get what you want all the time. Something you worked on really hard didn’t work.”
He continued, “You feel like you said something embarrassing today, you did something that didn’t sit right with you. It’s just so important that [your kids] see that and they don’t just hear, ‘Oh Dad nailed it.’ Because you lose so much more than you win.”
At the end of July, Reynolds also told the “Not Skinny But Not Fat” podcast that he and Lively have learned to “embrace the chaos” when it comes to raising four kids under 10.
“[We] have four kids. Like, OK, nothing’s going to be tidy ever again. It will, though, when they all leave the house,” he said.
Reynolds said Lively always reminds him “they’re all under our roof right now. The whole family’s under our roof right now. We have them all. And that is a fleeting thing. Not an infinite resource.”
Fox News Digital’s Christina Dugan Ramirez contributed to this report.
The post Ryan Reynolds says parents are ‘soft’ today in comparison to the ‘improvised militia’ he experienced appeared first on Fox News.
