10 Strict Rules Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds Follow While Raising Their Daughters
It's not all fun and games.
Hollywood’s favorite power couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds constantly make waves by showing everyone what it means to be in a healthy and happy relationship.
The "Deadpool" actor and "Gossip Girl" star share three lovely daughters together, James Reynolds, 7, Inez Reynolds, 5, and Betty Reynolds, 2, and they have a lot to say about how they manage to balance three daughters and two acting careers all at the same time.
10 strict rules that Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds follow while raising their children.
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1. No overlapping film schedules.
Being full-time actors, Reynolds and Lively are constantly busy with filming, promoting, and premiering all of the wonderful productions that they’re a part of. For any ordinary power couple, that means the possibility of overlapping work schedules is possible, but that’s something they have strictly prohibited for the kids.
“We don’t allow our schedules to overlap. We are very conscious of being very present as parents,” Reynolds told People Magazine. “I come from a big family and so does Blake and we want to create a very warm and happy environment for our children.” So while one of them is shooting a movie, the other one has their schedule cleared in order to care for their children.
2. They never split up the family.
Tying in with “being present” as parents means that the couple never splits up. “We don’t split up like I shoot movies and my wife shoots movies and we go travel all over the place and we just all go together,” Reynolds shared in the Access interview.
“I think that’s been the best part of it is that we really don’t spend a lot of time apart. I get to spend a lot of time with my girls.”
Not only do their schedules not overlap, but if their film/TV show/whatever takes them anywhere far from home, the rest of the family is always right behind them, so when Reynolds or Lively get home from a hard day of acting, they get to spend quality time together.
3. Ryan Reynolds's on-screen persona stays on the big screen.
If you’ve seen Deadpool (which you should if you’re a mature audience because it’s rated R), then you know that Reynolds' character in the film, Wade Wilson, is nothing short of a potty mouth. Not only is he a potty mouth, but he’s a pretty morally ambiguous dude — an anti-hero.
Many people have associated Reynolds with the character that he plays, but he promises that it’s all just a testament to his acting skills and that he’s actually quite soft and kind when it comes to his wife and his family.
When he was interviewed on the red carpet of the Detective Pikachu premiere by Vanity Fair, Reynolds said they try to keep the dialogue kid-friendly, despite admitting that he has slipped up a couple of times and dropped the f-bomb. “I think most parents go through that,” he said. “But we keep it pretty clean in the house and even on set,” meaning that the little ones even get to visit them on set sometimes.
4. No “gnarly” scenes for their daughters.
Once again, Deadpool is a pretty gnarly film — it has the R rating for a reason that’s much more than just a potty-mouthed Ryan. Things get action-y and people are brutalized and considering that there are more Deadpool movies likely to be made, they make sure to keep the kids away from the days they film stuff like that.
“I never brought them when I was doing something gnarly,” he said, but added that the makeup that he wore, which consisted of fake burn marks all over his face, also freaked them out and he wasn’t able to console them about it.
5. Give them as normal of a life as possible.
Living a super-famous life means that everyone knows everything about you at all times — Lively and Reynolds are no exception to that rule.
As such, they’ve made it a point to try and keep their kids out of the spotlight as much as possible, hoping to provide them with a normal life and not one without privacy.
“My husband and I chose a profession and a side effect of that is your personal life is public,” Lively told Marie Claire UK. “Our child hasn’t had the opportunity to choose whether or not she wants her personal life to be public or not.”
They try to keep it real at home, and even in public, sometimes being photographed covering their kids’ faces. “In order to give her as much normality as possible, we want her to have a childhood like we had. So we can’t really throw her into the lion’s den that is LA, not that we really want to,” she said.
6. Show the kids off and take pride in them.
Despite trying to keep them away from the spotlight, Ryan can’t help but show his daughters off to other people.
“I remember how I used to get bored when people would show their baby pictures, and I wanted to jump out of the window after parents would show me baby photos on their phone,” he said. “Since I’ve become a father, though, I can’t stop taking my own children’s photos and showing them to my friends.”
During the Access interview, he revealed how he felt about raising all girls, and said that he “never in a million years would have imagined” that he would be doing that. “I come from all boys. I have three older brothers. I’m the youngest of four boys, so for me to have three daughters has been such a ride,” he said. “I love every second of it.”
7. Laughter is mandatory.
In a house with Reynolds and Lively as parents, this should come as no surprise, but it’s something that they want to make sure they keep up in order to keep everyone happy. We already know that Ryan and Lively love to poke fun at each other on social media constantly and consistently, but they want to keep that same energy for their kids at home.
Blake has said that their oldest daughter, James, has developed quite a sense of humor because of her parents, and that’s not something that’s likely to change. Reynolds is also always cracking jokes or telling the world about all the funny things that their daughters do so we know that their family life is very lighthearted.
8. Parental duties should be split up equally and fairly.
Being a parent is hard. Raising one child is hard enough, but in order to raise three daughters, there’s a lot that needs to be done in the way of parenting. Reynolds and Lively make sure that neither he or she feel like they’re carrying a majority of the load when it comes to their kids, and so they communicate as best they can in order to maintain that symbiosis.
“Just do the dirty work man,” Reynolds told Seth Meyers in an interview referring to being a father. “You gotta do the diapers. You gotta do the middle of the night thing. A human being will exit your wife, so she’s done enough. Just change the diapers and do all that stuff.”
A woman should not be doing everything just because she’s a woman or she’s the one who carried the children — if anything, he thinks it should be the other way around.
9. They want to raise empowered daughters.
Alongside keeping it real, Reynolds and Lively pull no punches when it comes to telling their daughters how it is and empowering them every chance they get.
In an interview with Glamour, Lively revealed that they’ve banned the word “bossy” from their household to keep in line with gender equality and to stay away from stereotyping. “We’ve joked that my daughter is bossy,” she said. “But my husband said, ‘I don’t ever want to use that word again. You’ve never heard a man called bossy.’”
Together, they’re working harder on being more conscious about the terms they use and whatever gender norms they may be subscribing to. “My husband was like, ‘Why do I always say he?’ And I said, ‘That’s what we’re taught,’” she explains. “So he’ll pick up, like a caterpillar, and instead of saying, ‘What’s his name?’ he’ll say, ‘What’s her name?’”
They want to raise a bunch of little feminists and not girls that will conform to the mold.
10. They make sure that they are always communicating.
Communication is the number one most important rule for any couple to follow in order to have a successful relationship — and these two talk about everything.
Lively admitted that in her past relationships, she would always rely on her girlfriends instead of communicating with her partner — but with Reynolds, it’s a different story. “With him, we were friends for two years before we were ever dating. And I treat him like my girlfriend,” she explains to Glamour. “I’m like, ‘Hey, this happened. It upset me. This is how I feel. What do I do?’ And he does the same for me. He treats me like his best buddy.”
They have openly admitted to not taking each other too seriously, and it’s something that helps them in their marriage. I mean, have you seen the things they say about each other on Twitter? This likely registers the same way when it comes to raising their children — addressing conflicts in parenting by communicating and talking their way through everything.
Solving a problem is a lot easier when you have two minds working together instead of just one. Fortunately, Reynolds and Lively have five if you include their daughters, and they do pretty well keeping the family happy and healthy. They’re Hollywood’s “it couple” for a reason.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.