Perfect parents don’t exist, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less when we make mistakes. Brooke Shields recently opened up about a “bad mom move” that made her daughter Grier Henchy, 18, angry — and the situation is heartbreaking for everyone involved.
The Mother of the Bride star appeared on Jennie Garth’s I Choose Me podcast Wednesday, where she revealed that her youngest daughter “will never be OK with” her documentary Pretty Baby, which exposes her past being sexualized as a child.
In the interview, per PEOPLE, Shields said she “felt like it was time and it was appropriate” to release the movie, which was “a larger conversation about the sexualization of young women, especially in our society, and it just broadened the view of one person’s story.” She added, “And I was the conduit to a bigger conversation. And that, to me, is the biggest gift of all.”
However, her daughter didn’t see it that way. She said that Grier, who recently started college, “will forever be angry with me.” Shields revealed that Grier felt “ambushed with the information.”
“It was a bad mom move on my part,” she continued. “I didn’t set her up, and she doesn’t like being surprised. She felt sort of cold-cocked. I assumed it would be fine. I thought, well, ‘She knows her mother. Her mother’s healthy and not damaged.’ I thought she would be able to look at us now and think, like, ‘Wow, you’ve come a long way’, and ‘Isn’t that great?’ And no, no, no, she said she will never be okay with it. She will never be okay with anything happening to me.”
It’s completely understandable! There’s a fine line between protecting your kids and being open and honest with them about your past, and in this case, learning about how Shields was treated as a young child actor was just too much to handle for Grier. Her 21-year-old daughter Rowan, on the other hand, felt differently. “My older daughter really thought about it and said, ‘Well, it was tough. I don’t need to see that again, but women need to see this,’” Shields said. “So I think that period of maturity helped my older daughter to understand it differently.”
In an interview with PEOPLE last month, The Blue Lagoon star and her daughter opened up about the documentary. “I was learning about things the same time that the world was and I just took it more deeply and personally,” Grier admitted. “I couldn’t even get through it.”
Shields added, “I told her ‘but there’s a happy ending’ and she said, ‘I will never be okay with thinking something bad happened to you.’ She ended up missing the happy part. She felt helpless, and just as a mom, we make mistakes and sometimes we make assumptions. To see the documentary or to see your parents as a public figure that other people have opinions on is just an odd situation. I’ve learned a lot by listening to them.”
In March, Shields spoke with SHE Media’s CEO Samantha Skey at the SHE Media Co-Lab Whole Life Health at SXSW, where she revealed that Grier is bullied for her height (she’s 6’1”!). “Wow, wow, wow girls can be just plain mean,” she said. “And she comes home and I just want to talk about it and she’s like, ‘Don’t tell me to lead with kindness, don’t tell me to take the high road. I’m getting a nosebleed with this high road.’”
“Most of the vitriol that gets spewed at you, it only bothers you if you believe it,” Shields reminds her daughters.
She also talked about the documentary, sharing, “My older daughter saw the documentary and she said, ‘Mom, women need to see this. They need to see this,’” Shields said. “And that was a huge moment. She’s 20. So that was a big deal because she understood what that meant. And you compare that to what’s happening in social media and what they’re met with every day. That spurred a conversation that I would’ve never had.”
It’s hard having these big conversations with your kids as they get older — especially doing it in such a public way — but Shields seems to be handling it all with grace. And something tells us her daughters will be just fine.
Before you go, check out Brooke Shields’ best quotes about motherhood.
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