Robin Wright and Sean Penn’s two children are grown now, but the “House of Cards” star is reflecting on one major regret she has about raising them.
“I have a huge regret as a mother and have experienced the fallout of this regret for many years with my kids — I wasn’t hard enough on them,” Wright said in a new interview with the Sunday Times.
Wright, who was married to Penn from 1996 to 2010, said that her Oscar-winning ex was tougher on the kids, “but he was gone so much of the time.”
“He’d come back and be the policeman and then he’d leave me with the residue,” Wright shared. “Then I would soften the blow. We were both extremes. They didn’t get that grey area in the middle, which is stern, and that is what they needed.”
The two actors share a 34-year-old daughter, Dylan, and a son named Hopper, 32.
Wright shared that Dylan was rebellious, while Hopper has been open about dealing with a crystal meth addiction.
“Every day if the phone rings you’re, like, ‘Is he alive? Is she alive?’” the “Princess Bride” star said of her concerns. “I went through that for so many years with both of them.”
She said that both of her children are “in a really good place right now.”
Penn has previously opened up about the differences he and Wright encountered during their co-parenting journey.
“We have very separate relationships with our kids at this point and it seems to work better that way because they are making their own decisions,” the “Mystic River” actor said during an appearance on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast in 2018.
“As it turned out,” he said at the time, “she and I did not share the same ethical views on parenting, including the continuing parenting of adult children.”