Gwyneth Paltrow says she waited too long to fully embrace her stepchildren as her own.
On the April 8 episode of her “Goop” podcast — which featured her husband, Brad Falchuk, as a guest — Paltrow spoke about the work that went into blending their families.
Paltrow has two kids with her ex-husband Chris Martin, whom she divorced in 2016 after 13 years of marriage. In 2018, she married Falchuk, who has two kids from his previous marriage.
“We traversed through some really rough things,” Paltrow told Falchuk. “One of the most profound lessons that I’ve learned from my relationship with your daughter — which is now so fantastic — is there was a testing going on. She was testing me at the time to see at what point I would reject her.”
To overcome that initial friction with her stepdaughter and avoid being seen as the “evil stepmother,” Paltrow says she decided to embody a maternal essence.
“I was going to be that presence for her, always loving and forgiving in the face of, you know, if she acted up, and show her that ultimately I was so there for her that she would not question my intentions or think that I was there to take you away from her,” Paltrow said to her husband.
But it wasn’t easy and she often had to remind herself to be the adult if they ran into conflict.
At the same time, Paltrow was worried because she felt like she didn’t have “jurisdiction” to tell her stepkids how they should behave.
“I thought that in my case, if I assert my boundaries or my expectations around manners, or anything like that, it will exacerbate the situation,” Paltrow said.
It was difficult navigating the stepparent dynamic, which often felt “full of minefields,” she said.
“If I look back at my mistakes as a stepmother, I should have just treated them both like my kids way faster,” Paltrow said. “Like I was too worried about everyone’s feelings, in a way.”
During the Visionary Women’s International Women’s Day Summit in 2024, Paltrow said that being a stepmother was one of her “biggest learnings as a human being.”
“And my area of growth personally came from the initial difficult relationship I had with my stepkids, and now they’re like my kids,” she said, per Us Magazine.
Parenting experts previously told Business Insider about the common mistakes that stepparents make when trying to connect with their stepkids.
One mistake is trying to compete with the stepkids’ biological parents.
“Instead, speak directly to the child about their parent and encourage the relationship between the child and parent. This will help make clear that this isn’t an either/or situation,” Sarah Epstein, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in family dysfunction, told BI.
Another mistake is trying to discipline stepchildren before building a relationship. Clinical psychologist Dr. Kasi G. Patterson told BI it would be better to let the biological parent handle it first.
Only after a trusting relationship has been developed will the kids learn to view both parents — biological and stepparent — as authority figures and “can accept discipline from each of them,” he said.
A representative for Paltrow did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by BI outside regular hours.
