The couple sat down for the Goop podcast to address a variety of topics in honor of the actress' 50th birthday.
Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, Brad Falchuk, are opening up about their approaches to parenting each other's kids. Paltrow is mom to 18-year-old daughter Apple and 16-year-old son Moses with ex-husband Chris Martin, while Falchuk is dad to 18-year-old daughter Isabella and 16-year-old son Brody with his ex, Suzanne Bukinik.
Paltrow, 50, and Falchuk, 51, tied the knot in 2018 after several years together and took on the task of blending their families.
"You're a spectacular stepmom, like, thank goodness for you," Falchuk tells Paltrow on a new episode of her The goop podcast.
The Goop founder admits to having some reservations about her step-mom abilities, but her husband reassures her.
"You are! You know you are. My kids absolutely, I mean, you have a relationship with them outside of me," Falchuk says. "You talk to them all the time. They come to you for advice all the time. They rely on you."
Noting that she loves her stepchildren "so much," Paltrow says she has "one regret" about how she first approached her role as their stepmother.
"I think there's this archetypal evil stepmother and this inference that it's going to be this fraught thing," Paltrow explains. "So I think I came into it on tenterhooks... it's like you can only do the wrong thing. That's my only regret."
She says that at a certain point, she changed her mentality and it made all the difference.
"However many years ago when I was like, 'F**k it, these are my kids. I'm not going to be scared to discipline them or draw the boundary,'" she shares. "That's really what shifted everything."
Falchuk recalls one situation where Paltrow yelled at his son, Brody, at the dinner table.
"He was shocked for a second and then he was relaxed for the rest of dinner because he thought, 'Thank goodness, I'm just like every other kid here. She actually yelled at me for being an a**hole,'" he says.
Knowing what she knows today, Paltrow has a piece of advice for those who are becoming stepparents.
"I'd say, 'From day one, really treat them as your kid.' Meaning, don't have trepidation because they're not yours and you don't have jurisdiction," she explains. "It's like, no, be your full self as a parent with all the love and all the acceptance and all the boundaries, right? I just wish I had done that earlier."
Paltrow also praises Falchuk for being "exceptionally good" as a stepfather to her children.
"I think you have to define yourself as a stepparent the way you define yourself as a parent. Who am I in terms of archetype dad? For me, that just means providing stability and guidance and a sense of boundaries for the household and the family," Falchuk says of his approach. "This is who we are and what we do, and pulling people back into the boundaries when they step out of them and just try to be a guide to them from my experience and my wisdom."
He goes on to talk up Paltrow's ex, Martin, saying, "They have a great dad, right? The great thing is I don't have to be their dad. Their dad's a lot more fun than I am, and he loves them and spends time with them and all that stuff, and so the great thing is I don't have to be their dad. I'm not trying to replace their dad, but I am a dad to them... Fundamentally I love them like they're mine, because they are."
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