Parenting is a game that only the strongest of hearts should undertake. Ask any parent. It’s expensive, it’s heartbreaking, it’s exhausting, and worst of all, it’s what people judge you by.
Generation X had its fair share of romantics, who still believed in happy ever after, and the slackers who took things as they came—married, children, or not, no worries.
There are some notable differences between Gen X parents and Boomer parents: Gen X parents appear to be much more affectionate towards their children, involved in their children’s lives, yet liberal in letting their children discover their own gifts and follow their dreams.
Celebrity parents are always good fodder for the gossip columns: from the custody tussles for the United Colors of Benetton ad that form divorced couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s brood, to Nicholas Tse leaving S$190 million to his two little boys with ex-wife Cecilia Chung.But some Gen X celebrities have turned out to be great parents, whether they remain married or went separate ways.
Model Marrieds, Model Parents
Cindy Crawford, 54, was among the first supermodels when “supermodels” became part of the vernacular. The ‘90s heralded the age of the Supermodel (some of whom famously did not get out of bed for less than $10,000). This special class of models became household names, monopolizing everything from magazine covers to billboards, thanks to designers like Gianni Versace.
Their dating lives were front page news (remember Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield? Helena Christensen and the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchens? Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere?). So it was never really an expectation that any one of them would be ever stay married and raise normal kids.
But Cindy broke the mould. Married to businessman Rande Gerber now for 22 years, she not only stayed happily married, she gave birth to a son, Presley in 1999 and a daughter, Kaia in 2001, who have both grown up to be models like her. By all accounts, theirs is very much a close-knit family that maintains some level of normalcy amid celebritydom.
Let’s talk about Kaia. She is the princess of every runway, every magazine, every ad. But clearly she was raised right: her Instagram feed features as many books she is devouring as it does photos of her modeling for Chanel, Prada, Yves St Laurent and loads of other brands. And a healthy number of photos with Mom, with Dad and with big brother. The fact that Cindy Crawford has successfully reproduced a mini-her should not be at all surprising, but let’s face it, it is a little annoying that not only does Mom get to be an OG Supermodel who was the first of her kind to turn “Cindy Crawford” into a brand, her daughter is enjoying the same level of success and monetary reward (if not more!) than she did. What’s gratifying to know, however, is that Kaia’s riding on her own steam; after all, Mom’s still modeling in her own right 30 years on!
In an interview with Net-a-porter last year, Cindy said, “Kaia had some advantages. She is my daughter and people know that. But when people say that I bought her a cover of a magazine, I think, if I was going to buy a cover for someone, it would be me! If I could get someone into a fashion show, I would be getting it for myself.”However, mere mortal parents like us can totally identify with the Gerbers when we read that their son Presley Walker Gerber has turned out to be something of a rebel. The model for Superdry, Calvin Klein and G2000 has a rapidly growing collection of tattoos. His most recent one says “Misunderstood” and sits right across his right cheek. His celebrity tattooist JonBoy posted a photo with him, captioned “Sorry mom.” Mainstream and social media has not been kind, alluding to mental and other issues.
[Editor’s aside: My son was born three months before Cindy gave birth to Presley. I brought baby Bruce to a press conference and introduced him to Cindy (who, just four months post-partum, looked like she had never given birth). Reading about what Presley’s going through now makes my heart ache for his parents, and also for him. Of course Cindy’s worried about him—which mom wouldn’t be?]
Still, you’ll find through each of their Instagram feeds that the whole family pulls together when it matters. Presley helping his dad carry a large dispenser of water to their home during lockdown. Presley and Kaia helping their dad to paint a “pick-up only” sign for his Cuban eatery Café Habana.
Cindy Crawford has demonstrated how to conduct Gen X parenting, celebrity style: raise your children with good values, manage their exposure to fame and fortune, and provide a stable and safe family to come back to when things go wrong.
Football, Spice & Everything Nice
When Posh Spice met David Beckham, rumours were rife that a) they had been matched by their managers to create publicity b) they were going to break up in no time. Not only have David, 45, and Victoria Beckham, 46, been married 21 years, they are the Gen X parents we wish we had! They met by chance in 1997 at the Manchester United players lounge and he asked her for her number, which she wrote on a London-to-Manchester plane ticket (he still has it).
The couple got engaged in 1998, gave birth to their firstborn Brooklyn in March 1999, and were married in July that year in a lavish wedding. Yes, she fit into a beautiful Vera Wang, four months post-partum—that’s the difference between celebrities and humans. Twenty-one years have passed and rumours of their breaking up still surface now and then—gossip magazines are struggling to survive—but the Beckhams have only continued to thumb their noses at critics. Apart from Brooklyn, they have three other children: sons Romeo James, 18, Cruz David, 15 and daughter Harper Seven, 9.
Brooklyn Beckham seems to have followed in his parents’ footsteps and got himself engaged to actress Nicola Peltz at the age of 21. (Like his dad, he’s also marrying an older woman—Nicola is 25). If Instagram is anything to go by, Brooklyn models his sense of romance and loyalty after his father; the Internet is full of antics and sentiments shared between father and son. His parents threw him a swish 21 st birthday party with the other Spice Girls in attendance and Stormzy performing, and more recently, at his engagement party to Nicola, she wore a Victoria Beckham dress as he placed a £250,000 ring on her finger.
Over the years, both Victoria and David have shown that they are true partners in parenting and they share a unidirectional discipline when it comes to the children. They coordinate schedules ruthlessly so that one of them is home with the kids if the other has to travel.
Although the kids are aware that their family is monied, these Gen X parents do not encourage the slacker attitude: Brooklyn once worked in a London coffee shop for £2.87 per hour. They teach their children the value of money and of giving: Romeo ran a children’s marathon to raise funds for UNAids and his father’s charity.What may be most notable is that they police their children’s social media. When Brooklyn was 15 and had 4.4 million followers on Instagram, every post had to be approved by his parents before it went up.
Wisdom, grace and love are what the Beckhams have raised their four to know and to exercise. These two should really write the book on celebrity parenting.
Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
Lenny Kravitz met Lisa Bonet in the ‘80s when she played Denise Huxtable, the teenage daughter in the sitcom The Cosby Show. They were friends, and then roommates, but on her 20th birthday in 1987 the couple eloped and got married. Within a year, they had their first and only child together, Zoe.Gen Z will know Zoe Kravitz as Leta Lestrange in the Harry Potter spinoff movie series Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them. She has also starred in the Divergent series, TV series Big Little Lies and been cast as Catwoman in 2021’s The Batman.
While Lenny and Lisa’s short six-year marriage was pretty “normal” for Hollywood, what’s unusual is the way they raised their daughter successfully. Today, they form what looks like an ideal blended family, together with Lisa’s second husband, Jason Momoa and their two daughters Lola and Wolf.Zoe Kravitz’s childhood was, for want of a better word, unusual. After her parents split when she was three, she and her mom embarked on a hippie-style lifestyle in Los Angeles’ Topanga Canyon, a community where Lisa Bonet raised chickens and dogs. At age 11, Zoe chose to move in with her father—it was a total about turn, as by then Lenny Kravitz was a mega superstar and the young girl was surrounded by producers, stylist, assistants, and a string of Dad’s girlfriends which have included Nicole Kidman and Vanessa Paradis.
She told ELLE magazine, “I was a chunky, perfectly normal-looking 15-year-old, but I had this remarkably beautiful skinny mother and a father who was dating a supermodel, and I felt short and ungainly.” She also admitted to being a “grumpy teenager” with Nicole Kidman, who was engaged to her father at the time.The stress of living a celebrity kid’s life got to her, and Zoe became bulimic. When her parents found out, she went through therapy, only emerging from it a decade later.
Though hers is not the fairytale Hollywood kid story, Zoe Kravitz has grown up with parents who genuinely loved her. She has a creative crush on her mother: in 2018, she replicated the naked Rolling Stone photo Lisa Bonet posed for in 1988. Her Emmy-nominated series High Fidelity is a gender-flipped retelling of the 2000 movie High Fidelity starring John Cusack as a record store owner who has a fling with a club singer Marie de la Salle, played by Lisa Bonet. Indeed, mother and daughter are often photographed twinning on the red carpet.Like her parents—Lenny Kravitz was last seen as Cinna in the Hunger Games movies—she is gifted both as an actor and a singer. She fronts an electropop band called Lolawolf, named after her two step-siblings Lola and Nakoa-Wolf.
As she said in a 2016 interview: “It makes things so easy that my parents are still very close, they have so much love for each other. My dad and my step-dad get along really well, and my dad loves and is close with my step-brother and sister. It’s really beautiful. As long as everyone can be in the same room together, and have love for each other, it’s totally healthy.”
