
Here’s Why Reese Witherspoon Is Always Brutally Honest With Her Kids About The Things They’re “Not Good At”,“You rob them if you don’t let them sit in the discomfort of the experience,” Reese said on a recent podcast episode.
Here’s Why Reese Witherspoon Is Always Brutally Honest With Her Kids About The Things They’re “Not Good At”
Reese Witherspoon opened up about parenting and why she encourages her children to embrace failure.

While promoting her new children’s book, Busy Betty and the Circus Surprise, Reese made an appearance on the Good Inside With Dr. Becky podcast, where she and the host talked all about the “power of letting kids struggle.”

Without specifying who, the Oscar winner said: “I have one very introverted kid, very quiet. I have a very social kid. And I have a kid who’s very talkative, very inquisitive, and like, almost endlessly curious.”

Though Ava and Deacon are grown up now, Reese reflected on raising her kids over the years and said it’s a parent’s job to “know your players.”

“Each one of your kids is gonna be totally different… As parents, it’s our job not to make them conform to who we want them to be — it’s our jobs to figure out who they are and help them play to their strengths,” she explained.

“Little Busy Betty is who I was as a girl — high-spirited, lots of different ideas, learning from failure, which is a big piece of the book,” she said. “And a lot of it is literally things that have happened to my children or questions they’ve asked me.”

In response to this, Dr. Becky asked Reese to expand on why “learning from failure” is such a huge part of the project, and why it’s “so important” to kids’ development.

“I see this a lot with parents. I don’t know when we stopped letting our kids fail,” the actor began, before reflecting on lessons from her own upbringing.

Looking back on her suspension, Reese said her mom and dad didn’t attempt to defend her actions or fight back against the school’s decision, but instead, they forced her to “sit in it and feel uncomfortable.”

After this, Reese gave a specific example of how she put this into practice when her daughter, Ava, desperately wanted to be good at basketball.

“‘I didn’t score one goal, and everybody scored goals this entire season and I didn’t score any goals,’” she recalled her saying.

When dealing with this, Reese decided it was best to be honest and show her daughter the importance of accepting failure.

“To be completely candid, I was terrified,” she told Drew Barrymore back in 2020, soon after Ava’s 21st birthday.

“I think I was just trying to figure it out like every other mom, dad, partner, or grandparent who’s raising a child,” Reese continued, adding that there’s “a lot of compromise…but every bit of that sacrifice is truly worth it.”

You can listen to Reese’s full interview with Dr. Becky here.
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Topics in this article
- Reese Witherspoon
- Ryan Phillippe
Ellen DurneyBuzzFeed Staff
Ellen Durney is a Celebrity Reporter for BuzzFeed and is based in London.
Contact Ellen Durney at [email protected].
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