While speaking with PEOPLE about her support for the SNOO — the robotic bassinet from Happiest Baby that was recently granted De Novo approval by the FDA — the actress, 45, also got candid about raising her three sons.
The Avatar star, who shares twin sons Cy and Bowie, 8, as well as son Zen, 6, with husband Marco Perego-Saldaña, tells PEOPLE that parenting is the “most amazing thing, but it’s real.”
“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 continues. “It definitely makes you a lot more mindful than you have ever been in your whole entire life.”
Both with busy schedules, Saldaña says that she and her husband, a producer and director, are “constantly adjusting and readjusting” as parents and are “very honest with each other about what your bandwidth feels like it can be.”
“Certain seasons, I’m the one that may be taking over all of the domestic operations so that my husband can mentally break away and focus on his creativity. And other seasons when I go completely back into work mode, then we’re switching off,” she explains. “I don’t think it’s ever an even share of the load, which is why I think it’s important to be absolutely transparent with your bandwidth and where you are and how you’re doing.”
“But love comes with everything, so it’s always with the understanding that, ‘Today for you, tomorrow for me,’ and we’ve been constantly in that back and forth.”
Saldaña, who has been open in the past about not raising her boys with gender-specific roles, also shares that she and Perego-Saldaña are
“teaching our little boys to honor women and to celebrate women.”
Also “very important,” she says, is that they’re teaching them to “honor themselves, their femininity, 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,” she says. “We definitely understood the assignments and accepted it knowing that we were raising boys during a time when women’s movements are so important.”
To be clear, because we know there is often confusion.
Emotionally healthy individuals can have a balanced and well-managed emotional life, but this doesn’t inherently relate to gender-specific traits.
Embracing your feminine side is about recognizing and valuing certain qualities or attributes typically associated with femininity, regardless of your gender identity, and it doesn’t necessarily imply emotional health.
