Tatum opened up about raising his daughter, Everly.
Channing Tatum takes his role as a girl dad very seriously. The 41-year-old actor loves spending time with his 7-year-old daughter, Everly, but admitted he was nervous when he first found out that he and now-ex Jenna Dewan would be welcoming a baby girl.
"I was really nervous to be a girl dad. The first thing I did when I figured I was going to have a girl, I literally went to YouTube and figured out how to braid hair, just because I didn't want to be that dad," he admitted on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
"I bought a book on braiding hair," fellow girl dad Fallon noted.
"It's not easy! And it takes a long time," Tatum said of braiding hair. "The hardest thing is getting the three equal strands. Then they make it harder with layered hair and then you get halfway through it and realize one is too short and you have to start all over!"
Tatum was so inspired by his experiences with Everly that he wrote an adorable children's book about it -- The One and Only Sparkella.
The idea for the children's book began when Everly started wearing a watermelon-printed cape to preschool.
"When we were about to go to preschool this one morning, she got really self-conscious when we were about to leave and wanted to take it off," he said of the colorful cape. "And I said, 'What's going on?' And she said, 'I don't want to get laughed at. I don't want people to laugh at me.' And it sort of broke my heart because I'd never seen her be self-conscious or aware even of other people's perspectives. It was beautiful to know that I got to be there for her to help her through it. And that's kind of where the book came from."
As Tatum co-parents Everly with Dewan, he said one of his favorite father-daughter activities with his little girl is doing blindfold makeup competitions.
"I'm subjected to all kinds of things but that is weirdly one of my favorite games that we play," Tatum admitted. "You literally blindfold each other and you do the other person's makeup and then you style them and you do fashion shows around the pool and people vote to see who did it better."
In addition to working on his makeup skills, Tatum also spent his time in quarantine getting in shape.
"For the first week or two weeks I was just drinking beer and riding dirt bikes and I was like, 'I can't do this for two months. This is bad,'" he said of lockdown. "Then me and my buddy, we just went really, really hard. We started training every day and it was great. I came out a completely new person."
You can grab your own copy of Tatum's The One and Only Sparkella on Amazon.
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