Practice makes perfect! Zoe Saldana takes practical steps to keep her home a gender-neutral environment for her three sons — twins Cy and Bowie, 4, and Zen, 2.
In addition to having “female toys and male toys,” the Guardians of the Galaxy actress, 40, told Us Weekly exclusively on Tuesday, April 23, while celebrating the Planet Oat Oatmilk National Launch, “I’m always gonna be honest and that is always the best way to welcome healthy and truthful discourse, especially around parenthood. … [The twins] made a comment two weeks ago like, ‘Boys are stronger than girls,’ because they’re in that stage of comparisons. And you have to take a moment and kind of put together an answer that they will understand.”
The goal? “[To] not bring all this charge that you have as an adult and as a woman into their lives. They’re a blank slate.”
The actress, who shares her boys with her husband, Marco Perego Saldana, first opened up to Us about raising their sons this way in June 2018.
“We have a very gender-neutral environment where my husband participates in a lot of tasks that were normally given to women and vice versa,” the dancer said at the time. “I get to do a lot of male things, which is, I don’t know, put the TV together, fix things that break. We’re sort of a very gender-fluid household. I think it’s important to raise boys in that environment, and girls as well.”
When she and the artist, also 40, tied the knot in 2013, her husband took Zoe’s last name.
“He liked it,” the Law & Order alum told Us. “He wanted to really represent being a part of my family and represent my father’s legacy. He respected the fact that he didn’t want me to have to give up my name just because that’s the norm.”
Saldana partnered with Planet Oat Oatmilk because she’s “always looking in the market for nutritional products” that can be “versatile from morning to night. They have all the nutritional values that I’m looking for to keep these kids alive, but also they have the kind of versatility so that I can make a whipped [dish] and I could make pasta and I can make a smoothie and it doesn’t have the added sugar, it doesn’t have all the calories and I don’t have to make it from scratch. Because we can do it, but I don’t have the time.”
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
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