Demi Moore is getting candid about generational trauma — and how her granddaughter Louetta “Lou,” 17 months, is the perfect example of stopping the cycle. The Substance actress, who shares daughters Rumer Willis, Scout Willis, 33, and Tallulah Willis, 30, with ex-husband Bruce Willis, opened up about how her “magical” granddaughter is “already” showing signs of a different path forward in life in a new interview on The Jennifer Hudson Show.
“The great thing is I look at [Lou] and I realize that through how I choose to live, how my daughter [Rumer] and her sisters all choose to live, that we actually have a chance to break certain generational patterns. I can already see it within her,” Moore told host Jennifer Hudson on Sept. 20, per PEOPLE.
“Talk about choosing joy… she is a pocket of joy,” Moore added about Lou, who Rumer shares with ex-boyfriend Derek Richard Thomas.
Over the years, Moore has been incredibly vulnerable about her traumatic childhood and struggles with addiction. She was raised by two alcoholic, suicidal parents, she began her own journey with substance abuse as a young adult (and later relapsed in 2012) before getting treatment, which she chronicled in her emotional memoir, Inside Out.
In a 2019 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the Ghost star revealed that being a mom helped her begin to break the generational pattern. “My daughters offered me an opportunity to start to change the generational pattern. To be able to break the cycles,” she said, adding that she helped raise her daughters while “mothering myself” at the same time.
Rumer herself has struggled with alcohol addiction and smoking throughout her life. In a 2020 interview with SheKnows, the Sorority Row actress shared her experience of addiction, which is “emotional.”
“There’s such an emotional component to it,” she told us. “You can get the nicotine out of your system in three days, but the emotional component, why we smoke — those moments where you’re at a dinner party and you’re feeling uncomfortable so you get up from the table and your excuse is, ‘I’m going to go have a cigarette outside’ or you’re nervous to talk to a guy you like or a girl you like or whoever you like and say, ‘hey, do you have a light?’ There’s so many things that we become reliant on …There’s all of these kind of pathways in our brain that become so attached to, ‘this is helping me. This is calming me down.’”
She added, “I think it’s important to kind of take a pause in that moment and go, all right, ‘why am I really wanting a cigarette? What am I trying to avoid? What am I trying to numb my feelings from, what’s coming up that I want to escape?’ Say to yourself, ‘I’m going to take five minutes and if I still want it, I can reconsider then.’ And then after that five minutes, I’ll just keep trying five more minutes, five minutes at a time.”
What a beautiful and encouraging way to look at it. And once you are able to heal your own trauma and find that self-control, you can model a different way of life for your kids.
In a June 2024 interview with TODAY, the Rumer Has It founder shared how much “quiet confidence” she has grown as a mom herself. She added, “There’s something about becoming a mom that just. I don’t know, I have this kind of, ‘I can do anything.’”
And her parents also seem to be enjoying the grandparent life. “Honestly, seeing [Moore and Willis] with her, it almost unlocks all of these childhood memories because being a grandparent, I think, is the best,” Rumer said. “They have all of the love and joy without any of the responsibilities. They get to just spoil her.”
Just loving freely without responsibilities is a right Moore has earned over the years. She told Hudson today that one of her biggest parenting lessons has to do with letting go of your own expectations. “Recognizing that we are just the managers, we don’t own. We just need to step back… for me I feel like my job is just to love my children and to give them the room to be who they are,” Moore said, adding, “Rescuing our children, which is our intuitive instinct, isn’t always the best thing. You have to give them the room.”
Before you go, check out every time Bruce Willis, Emma Heming, and Demi Moore were blended family goals.
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