Riley Keough Is Breaking a Parenting Pattern Started by Grandfather Elvis Presley
He may have been the King of Rock and Roll, but that doesn’t mean Elvis Presley knew everything about parenting. In fact, one method the late rockstar used with his daughter Lisa Marie Presley, who he shared with Priscilla Presley, isn’t going to work for his granddaughter Riley Keough. She revealed she’s breaking one parenting pattern that her late mom and her grandfather used, and we love how she’s keeping it real.
The Under the Bridge actress, who shares 2-year-old daughter Tupelo with husband Ben Smith-Petersen, opened up about the way she’s starting her own tradition with her child on an appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast on Wednesday. “I think [Lisa Marie] was such an amazing parent and she wanted us to have, I think like her father did, these amazing experiences all the time,” Keough said about her famous family, per PEOPLE. “For me personally, I think that the problem there could be for some that when you’re used to so much, it’s hard to find joy in simple things.”
There’s a reason parents nowadays rotate toys and create minimalist-inspired homes for their kids. Because too much can be overstimulating and make it hard to enjoy anything — and that’s without adding fame and wealth into the occasion. Wanting to give your child the world and having the means to do so could make for some spoiled kids. So Keough wants to do things differently.
“And so I really want my children to be able to find joy playing in the backyard and doing normal kids stuff and not need elephants and circus and all these things all the time,” she continued, adding that she understands where her mom was coming from. “I think her intention was really wanting to give everything she could to her kids,” she said.
In a December interview with Elle, the actress reflected on “how wonderfully colourful my upbringing was.” She explained, “It wasn’t about the fame or anything. I know that’s unusual, but it was more so that there was a lot of joy. Things were very big and fun, all the time. So I kinda look back and – wow! – I can’t believe all that happened. We travelled to so many places and did so many things. And now my life is quite simple. I can’t believe that was real, because we did so much.”
Despite wanting to keep things simple for her daughter, Keough still takes some of her parenting from her family’s influence. The Daisy Jones and the Six star opened up about parenting during her book tour for her mom’s memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown. “I think that I always say it’s this southern style of parenting, but it’s actually very specifically my family,” she told Taylor Jenkins Reid in November. “I think it is from the south, but whatever way [my mom] was parented was how I was parented in a sense. And I also now sort of parent that way. It’s really loving and tactile and smothering — no boundaries.”
She even wrote about it in Lisa Marie’s memoir, which she finished after her mom’s death. “I thought putting in the way that my family in the south spoke to each other in this totally insane way, kind of could help paint the picture of absolutely the wildness,” she explained.
Striking out on your own path to consciously parent your kids in a different way isn’t easy (breaking generational trauma never is!), but Keough seems to have a good plan for both passing down the good parts of her childhood and modifying the not-so-good parts to fit her style now. And it’s an inspiration for us all!
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