Sharing, shoving, throwing sand, walking up the slide instead of going down it. These are the typical playground battles, the little things that parents help their kids navigate on a daily basis.
The Nice Guys star Ryan Gosling is engaged in a surprisingly different playground battle with his 1 1/2-year-old daughter Esmerelda.
During a recent visit to the Ellen Show, the dad-of-two – he and Eva Mendes welcomed their second daughter, Amada, earlier this year – had to provide a little background before he went on to share a funny parenting story.
“When I was a younger man I had a fantasy of getting into the graffiti world, for a minute. I was living downtown, and I heard that if you tag over someone else’s tag, that’s how you start a battle. So I did this for a few months and no one ever bothered to battle with me because I guess I was so bad at it,” Ryan, 35, recalled.
Fast forward several years, and the handsome star finds himself drawing on his very short-lived stint as a graffiti artist in order to pass along some playground survival skills to his toddler.
“Some kid has been erasing her name and writing their name over it. So now, finally, I’m in a proper tagging battle,” Ryan quips. “And this kid has access to an unfair amount of chalk. I’m trying to explain to my little girl that this is [not right]. She doesn’t care. She’s like, ‘Well let’s just chalk anywhere else,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no. They’re disrespecting your mother. Because, she gave you this name and they’re erasing it.’
“So the only way to really get back at them is to erase their name. And not disrespect their mother, but definitely put her on notice. Because I think she’s the chalk supplier.”
It sounds like Ryan may find a peaceful resolution to his daughter’s chalk art dilemma: “You’ve got to be careful when you’re trying to teach your kid what a reasonable amount of vengeance is,” he jokingly acknowledges.
On the scale of helicopter-to-free-range-parenting, I’m not quite sure where this little tongue-in-cheek tale places Ryan. Training your toddler in the fine art of playground warfare seems to fall somewhere in the middle.
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