Zoe Saldaña plans to educate her three sons on being in touch with their emotions and tapping into their feminine sides.
On Tuesday, the Avatar star said she and her husband, Marco Perego-Saldaña, vow to raise their children in a gender-neutral household and teach them to “honor themselves, their femininity [and] to celebrate their feminine self as well.”
“We’re very hard on our boys the same way we’re hard on women. And boys are encouraged to be strong and to suppress their emotions. And then once you learn to do that so much for so long, you become completely excommunicated from your feelings,” the 45-year-old explained in an exclusive interview with People.
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She continued, “We definitely understood the assignments and accepted it knowing that we were raising boys during a time when women’s movements are so important.”
The couple has been married for 10 years and shares 8-year-old twin sons, Cy and Bowie, and 6-year-old son, Zen.
Saldaña is known to be very vocal about her parenting style and how she raises her children. The Hollywood actor and her husband plan to defy societal norms by showing her boys that genders don’t have roles in healthy relationships.
“We are here to set very big tones for them in life on how to be, how to react, how to regulate, how to repair, how to heal, how to stand up for yourself. So they’re going to be constantly mirroring what you do, knowing that you’re being observed at all times,” she said. “It definitely makes you a lot more mindful than you have ever been in your whole entire life.”
The New Jersey native has always wanted to do things differently as a parent. In 2018, Saldaña revealed to People that she and her husband were raising their three sons in a “gender-fluid environment.”
“When you look at parenting, the whole thing about matriarchy and patriarchy, and Daddy’s little girl and Mama’s boys — my husband and I find that completely ludicrous and absolutely unhealthy for the upbringing of a child,” she said.
“You’re giving them a very distorted and limited view on what a female role is supposed to be in a family and what a male role is supposed to be,” Saldaña added.
