Jane Fonda doesn’t have many regrets in life, but she does have one and she’s currently trying to make up for it.
“I was not the kind of mother that I wish that I had been to my children,” the 85-year-old actor told CNN’s Chris Wallace.
“I have great, great children — talented, smart — and I just didn’t know how to do it.”
Fonda is the mother of three children: Vanessa Vadim, Troy O’Donovan Garity, and Mary Luana Williams. She recently sat down with Wallace and spoke about not knowing how to parent her children when they were young.
It’s something she has regretted her entire life, but hopes to make up to them.
‘I just didn’t know how to do it.’
Like nearly all new parents, the award-winning actress, was naïve when it came to raising a child.
It wasn’t until years later when she founded an organization that deals with teens that she began to understand what it meant to parent a child.
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“I have an organization in Georgia that deals with adolescents and I’ve studied parenting. I know what it’s supposed to be now. I didn’t know then. So I’m trying to show up now.”
Fonda founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Power and Potential (GCAPP) in 1995. The organization’s goal is to improve the overall health and social well-being of young people.
“What I’m really scared of is getting to the end of life with a lot of regrets when there’s no time to do anything about it. And it’s one reason that I try, I’m trying to get it all done before I come to the end.”
Parenting is hard. It’s one of the most difficult things to do.
There is no perfect way to do it, and it’s one of the only jobs you learn on the fly. We must all give ourselves a bit of grace when it comes to parenting our children.
