Mandy Moore’s honest take on three kids: “I can’t be the perfect parent for all of them at the same time”
(Photo by Presley Ann/Getty Images for Age of Learning/ABCmouse)
We chatted with Moore about the demands of three in different stages, how to manage the mayhem and what she’s stopped expecting from herself.
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This week Mandy Moore has one kid starting kindergarten and, a day later, another starting preschool, plus a not-quite-2-year-old who needs her through all of it. Three kids, three stages, and plenty of chaos.
The logistics, she’s got on lock. Moore is up by 5:30 for coffee and a few quiet minutes before anyone else is up, with lunches half-packed the night before and the frying pan and plates already staged on the counter.
We chatted with Moore about the demands of three in different stages, how to manage the mayhem and what she’s stopped expecting from herself.
You can’t be everything to everyone at once
With a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a toddler, the demands don’t conveniently take turns. Someone needs her at the exact second someone else does, and Moore spent a while treating that like a problem she could out-organize. Now she’s a little more realistic. “I can’t be the perfect parent for all of them at the same time,” she says. Accepting that did more for her mornings than any system, it seems.
In practice it means knowing what reliably engages each kid and using it without guilt. Lou, her youngest, will absorb herself into a stack of books. Ozzie is content with a fistful of monster trucks. Gus, the new kindergartner, will draw. That buys her enough room to give one of them her full attention and point the other two somewhere safe and sound. When it falls apart anyway, and with a 3-year-old it will, she and her husband, Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith, tap in and out. “You handle Ozzie, I’m going to take Lou and Gus,” she says, usually after someone has come undone over getting a red apple instead of the green one he specifically requested. (Celebrity kids–they’re just like ours, obviously.)
Lose it, then repair it
Moore is refreshingly for real about the fact that she’s going to run out of patience sometimes. “We’re not robots,” she says. She’d rather expect that than be ambushed by it. “That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. You gotta let yourself off the hook a little bit.” What she actually watches is the recovery. She takes a breath, collects herself and, if she handled something in a less than ideal way, apologizes and repairs it, on the theory that the repair is the part kids carry with them.
Three isn’t harder than one
When someone with one kid tells her they can’t imagine doing it with three, she doesn’t accept the premise. “It’s as hard as your experience allows for,” she says. Difficulty, to her, scales with how far a day stretches past what you already know how to handle, and three kids is simply her normal. By that math the hardest leap, in her experience, was from zero to one. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” she says. Everyone since has shown up with a little more context, and while she won’t pretend three is easy, she says she’s a calmer version of the parent she was with only Gus.
Use screens–wisely
Screen time in her house is deliberate and not an everyday thing, which is roughly how she became an ABCmouse partner after both boys were already fans. She likes that it’s ad-free and teacher-backed enough that she isn’t hovering. Mostly she likes what it does for Gus. “He thinks he’s just playing games when he’s really learning,” she says. “He’s like, ‘I feel so smart.’”
Get dressed everyday
Her own upkeep is minimal and non-negotiable. Coffee, now with protein powder stirred in so there’s fuel in the tank on the mornings breakfast doesn’t happen. And real clothes, even if that’s as far as it goes. Makeup is optional, hair can be shoved under a hat, but actually dressed is key. “If I’m in real clothes, I feel like I’m ready to take on the day,” she says. With three kids at three stages, ready is a generous word, and she’ll take it.
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