TWO major A-list celebrities were talking about the pressures of parenting this week and it made me feel all kinds of better.
Angelia Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow were speaking separately about how this parenting lark can be tough. And if two women with no money worries and an army of help at their disposal find it hard going, I got to thinking I'm not doing too badly sitting over here in non-Hollywood land with a lot less millions in the bank, trying my very best.
Speaking during a recent film tour which she brought her six children on, Angelina Jolie confessed she suffers from "mum guilt" and can be "pretty tough" on herself when it comes to raising Maddoz (20), Pax (17), Zahara (16), Shiloh (15) and 13-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox, whom she shares with her ex-husband Brad Pitt.
While promoting her latest film, Eternals, the star admitted to regularly questioning her parenting decisions.
"I'm not a perfect parent by any means," she told People.
"Every day I feel like I'm more aware of everything I don't do right. I'm pretty tough on myself, because I feel often, 'Am I doing the right thing? Did I say the right thing?"
I hear you, Angie, it's tough going. With the two teenagers in our house particularly, I constantly worry if I'm doing the right thing. If I give them too much freedom or not enough for them to grow as responsible individuals.
I worry about the outside world and bad influences and drugs and alcohol and violence and discrimination. I worry about the impact the pandemic has had on them. I worry about guiding them too much or too little and not giving them the space to grow and become independent.
I worry about their education and future careers and health and their place in the world and their safety. I think about if smoothing the path for them is really the right way to go, or if challenge builds character and resilience.
I literally worry for a living. It's my full time job. I just do my real job as a means to take my mind off the worrying about my kids for a few hours. I expect Angelina does the same with the Hollywood film thing.
Then I saw that Gwyneth Paltrow wanted to be in me and Angelina's 'Ceaselessly Concerned Parents' gang too. During a recent Red Table Talk, she spoke about trying to successfully navigate life with her now teenager, Apple, and her younger brother Moses.
"I spend a lot of time with them talking and watching," she said.
"I read this quote. I think it was attributed to Banksy, the artist, who said something like 'this generation of parents will do anything for our kids, anything'.
"You see with the college scandal or, you know, removing all their obstacles. Like, we will do anything for our kids except let them be who they actually are.
"And I read it, and I had chills, and I thought, there are aspects of me that think, 'Well, you should do it this way because that worked for me,' or 'Let's avoid this.' And so I just tried to be really conscious of letting them emerge as who they are and being loving and supporting, and I mess it up all the time.
"Like, I say the wrong thing. And especially right now because she's 17. Everything I say is wrong."
Parenting is tough, whether you are a Hollywood starlet with a healthy bank account, you're a teacher from Newry or you're a single mother from Portadown.
These kids of ours need someone to nurture them as human beings and light their path. It's a huge, at times exhausting and often thankless task.
But some day, after years of helping them grow as individuals, we'll be able to sit back and take pride in what we achieved because we kept going. We will smile knowing we might have thought in the heat of the relentless and exhausting blur that can be parenting that we were messing it up, but we were actually doing a good job.
