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George Clooney Shares His Number One Parenting Tip

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Oscar-winning actor George Clooney has graced our screens for decades playing every character imaginable. But over the last three and a half years, his biggest role to date is one in his personal life: Being a dad to his young kids.

Clooney seems to have the whole fatherhood thing figured out at this point and even recently opened up about his biggest tip for parenting.

How Many Kids Does George Clooney Have?

Clooney married human rights attorney Amal Alamuddin in 2014 after a friend introduced the pair in 2013. They have one set of twins, daughter Ella and son Alexander, who were born in 2017.

“Listen, I’m scared to death, it’s terrifying,” Clooney said about first becoming a parent. “You’re afraid of breaking them. They’re so little.”

He’s also a known prankster and proud to pass on those talents to his kids. “The peanut butter on the tennis shoe move,” he recalled when asked about a trick he was excited to teach Ella and Alexander. “You walk into a party with peanut butter on your tennis shoe, and you look around and ask anybody if it smells like crap, and then you reach down and you actually taste the peanut butter off of your shoe with your finger. That will really throw people up.”

What Has Clooney Learned About Parenting?

Clooney has kept much of his personal life out of the spotlight, but he recently opened up about fatherhood and taking care of toddlers. In particular, the most important thing he’s learned is that he wants to give his children the independence they need to try new things and create their own paths for the future, even if that’s scary for him as a father.

“The idea of them falling is not my favorite thing,” he told The Guardian recently about watching the twins learn how to ride bikes. “I try to give ’em enough room to make their mistakes.”

Having navigated an unpredictable and uncertain industry for years despite his own dad’s wishes, Clooney believes that, as a parent, he should keep from “pre-supposing anything onto your children in terms of what you want from them.” He wants to give them room to grow into the people they want to be.

Still, it’s a work in progress. “I hope I will be at a place where I can say, ‘All right. Make your mistakes,’” he explained. His kids are young, so there’s plenty of time for him to adjust. But it sounds like George Clooney is doing more than fine on the dad front.

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