Ryan Reynolds says modern parents are ‘so soft’ compared to his childhood

Ryan Reynolds has said that modern parents are “soft” towards their children as he reflected on the changing dynamics of raising a child.

The Deadpool star, 47, shares James, nine, Inez, seven, Betty, four, and Olin, one, with his wife, It Ends with Us actor Blake Lively, whom he married in September 2012.

Reynolds admitted becoming a parent had changed the way he processes his own emotions and said his own childhood was “an improvised militia” compared to what his kids have experienced.

Speaking to For the Culture author Marcus Collins at the Inbound tech conference in Boston, Reynolds said: “I took a workshop on conflict resolution and that changed my entire life.”

He explained: “I just didn’t know how to process things that I felt. Because I [had a] scarcity mindset when I was younger. I didn’t know how to unfold that thing in your brain that conditions you just always to win or be right.”

The Proposal actor said of his children’s outlook on life: “I have four kids and so far, none of them seem to have that [scarcity mindset], partly because they were born on Easy Street.

“Parents today are so different. We’re so soft. I don’t yell. I grew up with like — it was nuts, it was an improvised militia.

“Now it’s like, I can go look at all my resources for parenting and remind myself how to be perfectly compassionate,” he said.

Reynolds has, however, previously admitted he still reaches breaking point with his children.

Back in 2022, he joked that his three daughters, Betty, Ines, and James are so “wild,” that he sometimes thinks they have “rabies”.

“I’m like any parent. I’ll have a moment where I’ll just snap,” he said. “It’s not so much what you do in the moment that’s interesting, it’s what you do afterwards.”

The Deadpool actor has also said that he wouldn’t be the father he is if it wasn’t for his wife showing him the way.

“Blake, full disclosure, really showed me how to do all this,” he told David Letterman on the Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.

Asked if he would feel anxious if Lively left him to look after the children on his own while she visited family, Reynolds joked: “I would, first off, never let her go visit her family. No, yeah, that is illegal. That’s kidnapping.”

Reynolds has previously spoken about his complicated relationship with his father James, who died in 2015 at the age of 74 after nearly two decades of living with Parkinson’s disease.

"It really destabilised my relationship with him because I didn’t really know what was happening," the actor reflected.

“[I] realised later that it was due to the hallucinations and delusions his father experienced years into the diagnosis.”

He continued: “As I’m older now, I look back at it, and I think of it more as that was my unwillingness at the time to meet him where he was.

“I could have maybe been there with him toward the end, and I wasn’t. He and I just drifted apart, and that’s something I’ll live with forever."