Tom Hanks is getting candid about his parenting style compared to how he was raised by his “preoccupied” parents.
The 68-year-old actor appeared on the latest episode of iHeartPodcasts “On Purpose with Jay Shetty," which dropped on Oct. 28, where he recalled growing up with divorced parents and how it affected him in raising his four children.
“My parents were very preoccupied with the positives and miseries of their lives,” Hanks, the third out of four siblings, told host Jay Shetty. “I like to joke that they pioneered the marriage dissolution laws for the state of California...My home environment was fluid in that we moved a lot. And we were suddenly living with a whole different set of people because my parents got remarried and whatnot. By the time I was seven, I had lived in eight different homes. By the time I was 10, I lived in ten different homes.”
Reflecting on his childhood ups and downs, Shetty asked if he tries to parent differently than his own parents.
“I try to, but I made every mistake. You know, you scar the kids somehow in the same exact way,” Hanks said. “And as they get older, you come back around and (say), ‘Hey, can I talk about what a knothead I was with you for all those years?’ And (they say), ‘Yeah, sure, dad. Yeah, I’ve been kind of waiting for this. Why don’t you unload.’”
Hanks shares son Colin Hanks, 46 and daughter Elizabeth Hanks, 42, with his first wife, Samantha Lewes. He also is father to sons Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 28, whom he shares with longtime wife Rita Wilson.
“But I would say at the same time... does it come up to be 50-50?” he continued. “Maybe the attitude and the life that we led. The laughs, that stuff’s worth its weight in gem-encrusted gold.”
When asked what is something that his four children have taught him, Tom Hanks replied, “How different they all are. They are not the same type of human being ever.”
The Oscar winner recalled a story that included his youngest, Truman Hanks, that made him “feel good” about fatherhood.
“My youngest at one point said something that was definitely true for him. And I thought is in fact true for all of my kids, which makes me feel good,” he shared. “He was younger. He was like seven or eight. I said, 'Oh, at one point, let’s go down — we were in New York — let’s go down to the park and we’ll take our gloves, we’ll throw it around. We’ll bat the balls. We’ll just find a place (on the) grass.’ And (he) said, ‘OK, let’s do that.’"
“And it got away from me,” he said, saying that their time together at the park “didn’t happen.”
“Something happened and I realized, Oh, the sun’s going down now. And I said, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Hey, I’m sorry. I said, we were going to go down and throw the ball around. It got away from me. Forgive me,’” Tom Hanks said. “And he said, ‘No, that’s OK, dude.’ And he sounded disappointed.”
Tom Hanks apologized, saying he felt bad and told him, “I don’t want you to be bored.” “And he looked at me with a look on his face and said, ‘Dad, I’m never bored.’ And that... speaks to curiosity and drive and also the comfort of where one is in order to feel free in order to explore whatever world that is.”
For Tom Hanks, that made him realize that his children had the “ability to pursue their own interests without being prodded, without being forced to. I’ve learned from that.”
“They have never said that they’re bored. They’ve always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not,” he said.
All three of the “Forrest Gump” star's sons would go on to follow in their father's acting footsteps, while Elizabeth Hanks is a writer.
Hanks has previously opened up about how older children grew up differently than his sons with Wilson.
“I start thinking about mistakes I made with my own kids and not explaining things or not being there for them. Or being so preoccupied with other things that are going on in our adult world,” he told the New York Times in 2019. “My son Colin was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter, but that means we have this gestalt understanding because they remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent. My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different.”
