Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals Her ‘One Regret’ About Step-Parenting with Brad Falchuk

Gwyneth Paltrow is opening up about being a step-parent.

On Tuesday (September 27), the 50-year-old actress and her husband Brad Falchuk spoke candidly about being step-parents to their respective kids, with Gwyneth admitting she had some difficulty with it at first.

Gwyneth shares two kids – daughter Apple, 18, and son Moses, 16 – with ex-husband Chris Martin while Brad, 51, shares daughter Isabella, 18, and son Brody, 16, with ex-wife Suzanne Bukinik. Gwyneth and Brad married in 2018 after four years of dating.

“There’s just no playbook for how to do it,” Gwyneth shared on her Goop podcast. “I think there’s this like archetypal evil stepmother and this inference it’s going to be this fraught thing, so I came into it on tender hooks like, ‘Oh my gosh, you can only kind of do the wrong thing.’”

Gwyneth then admitted her “trepidation” was her “one regret” about first becoming a step-parent, explaining that she eventually found her voice, which “shifted everything.”

“However many years ago I was like, ‘F–k it, these are my kids. I love them. I’m not gonna like be scared to discipline them,’” Gwyneth shared. “If someone asked me for advice on it, I would just say from day one, just really treat them as your kid.”

She added, “I just wish I had done that earlier.”

Despite her initial apprehension, Brad praised her relationship with his kids, saying she’s a “spectacular stepmom.”

“You have a relationship with them outside of me,” Brad explained. “They talk to you all the time, they come to you for advice all the time, they rely on you.”

Later in the podcast, Brad praised Chris, 45, as a “great dad,” adding that the Coldplay frontman is “a lot more fun” than he is.

“The great thing is I don’t have to be their dad,” Brad said. “I don’t have to provide the things their dad provides for them. He loves them and spends time with them and all that stuff. So, all I have to do is just be ‘dad’ when I’m the dad in the house.”

Find out what Gwyneth recently shared about sending daughter Apple off to college.