Hilary Duff talks guilt over being a working parent: 'I give myself the hardest time'
Hilary Duff feels it, too.
The mom to 7-year-old son Luca and daughter Banks, 15 months, often feels bad about missing time with her kids when she’s filming her TV Land show Younger, the much-anticipated reboot of Lizzie McGuire or anything else.
Then she realizes that’s absurd.
“Sometimes I tend to get really caught up in work and then feel like I’m not giving enough for my kids or whatever, and I am,” Duff tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “I do everything I can to put them first and be there first and do everything for them, and I think that the second that I miss a bedtime or something at school that I couldn’t be at, I give myself the hardest time, and I’m not superwoman.”
Duff vows to spend more time just being wherever she’s at, be it work or home or anywhere else, in 2020.
“I love to work, and I love my job. I love the confidence that it gives me or the power that I feel sometimes,” Duff says. “I think that just being present and having a good time — I have so much to be grateful for — and I hope to carry that through the rest of the year.”
She’s also working to stay healthy in the months ahead by continuing her macrobiotic diet, which she’s done in the past and returned to before her wedding in December. (“I actually feel really good now!” she says.)
Duff has also partnered with Zicam to promote the brand’s homeopathic products to shorten colds, for those times when she does feel under the weather.
As she’s grown older, Duff has found herself turning to natural brands more and more.
“I think being conscious of the products we buy, food-wise,” Duff explains. “I do a lot of oils and stuff like that in my bath and their bath... I put oils on the kids’s feet at night before bed. Now they just expect it and they like it. It’s almost like a nighttime ritual, you know, that’s just fun to do with your kids. We drink a lot of water.”
Duff adds immune boosters to her kids’s water, she says.
“I think half the battle is trying to defend yourself against your kids, too,” she says. “Trying to worry about what we’re doing for them and we have to put ourselves first because we’re the ones driving the ship.”
In that spirit, Duff intends to take shorter versions of her honeymoon to South Africa more frequently.
“We had the best time. We’re always so worried about our kids, but it was nice to just not be, to sit in it and be together and be a little selfish,” she says. “So we’re going to try to make a pact to, throughout the year, take little three-day trips, even though it’s obviously not as far as South Africa.”
Of course, Duff’s daily life with the kids is an adventure, too. Luca, her son with former husband Mike Comrie, has a cute reaction to his mom’s job.
“Right before school was over last year, there were a bunch of Younger posters all over our neighborhood, and so he would always see them, and he’s just funny about it,” Duff says. “He’ll sometimes be like, ‘Oh, hey, Mom,’ if a bus passes by and I’m on it. He notices, but it’s normal for him, I guess.”
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