Actress Geena Davis is glad she waited until her late 40s to have children because she believes it helped her be more “evolved” as a parent.
The 66-year-old Academy Award winner made the statements during an interview with the podcast “Loose Women.”
She said, “I’m just really grateful that I had children in my 40s. And I wanted to wait, hoping that I could still have kids but I thought I’ll be more evolved the later … the longer that I wait because I did have a sense that I wasn’t; that I didn’t have a lot of self-esteem, I guess is what you’d call it, but I was really determined that my kids would have self-esteem.”
Davis shares daughter Alizeh, 20, and twin sons Kaiis and Kian, 18, with her ex-partner, plastic surgeon Reza Jarrahy. While Jarrahy claimed they were married since 2001 and divorced in 2017, Davis insisted that the ceremony they had was symbolic and they were never legally wed.
The actress had Alizeh when she was 46 and the twins when she was 48.
When asked how she tries to “empower” her children, Davis said she turned to her parents as role models. “I picked up more from the way my parents modeled their behavior than telling me how to be,” she explained.
This wasn’t the first time the “Beetlejuice” actress expressed gratitude for being an older mother. In 2020, she told The Guardian she was happy to have waited. “I always felt lucky that I had my kids late, because I just feel like I changed so much. I always knew I wanted kids, but what I was doing waiting that long, I don’t know. I never tried before, in other words. But it’s been great. And twins are fun!”
She told Good Housekeeping in 2006 that waiting to become a mother meant she didn’t become too involved in her children’s lives.
“I felt 100 percent that I would be such a better parent than I would have been even five years earlier and certainly ten or 20 years earlier,” Davis told the publication.
“If I’d had kids earlier, I could easily have become one of those mothers who over-involve themselves and try to live life through their kids. I’m sure there are younger people who have figured things out long before I did, but in my case, I became a parent with exactly the right person, at exactly the right time.”
