We can always learn from our mistakes, but how do we prevent kids from making the same ones? This was the question on Drew Barrymore‘s mind during a Feb. 27 segment of her show with special guest and mom of two Pink. “What can I tell myself when I’m afraid my kids will do some of the stuff I did?” Barrymore asked the singer, referencing her own difficult past. Pink responded, “I mean, we made it. Why did we make it? We made terrible decisions.”
Pink continued: “The kids, they’re gonna be alright. Because they can borrow some of our knowledge, they’re gonna buy their own, and we have open conversations about life.” For her family, which includes 11-year-old daughter Willow and 6-year-old son Jameson, the real struggle has been finding a way to balance the goodness of childhood with the harsh realities of life.
“I’m trying to walk that line of like, I want you to have a childhood, I want to preserve some of your innocence, but I also know that you need to be prepared for the world that we live in,” she explained. “Not to be a Debbie Downer, but these kids are having active-shooter drills in school. This is the world we live in, they need to be prepared. So we go to Disneyland, we eat ice cream, and we talk about our feelings.”
Current stressors aside, Barrymore said she still fears the hardships her kids may face. Pink sympathized but added that she didn’t actually have a surefire remedy for that anxiety. “I have a tote bag that says, ‘I literally have no idea what I’m doing,’ and I wear it to preschool drop-off,” she laughed. “The problem with us is that we want to get it right so bad because we know what it feels like to be the kid where it didn’t go right. And none of us know anything about what we’re doing.”
But that doesn’t mean parenthood isn’t worth it: even without a kind of “blueprint” from their own families, Pink and Barrymore agreed that creating their own has been an amazingly rewarding process. “I think it’s the most healing, wonderful thing I’ve ever gotten to do with my life,” Barrymore said on becoming a mother to her daughters, 10-year-old Olive and 8-year-old Frankie.
“When you see a little girl come into the world untouched by the world – unhurt, unstained, unbroken. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Pink said. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s how we start. That’s who we are.'”