Ryan Reynolds Reflects on Being a Dad to Three 'Wild' Girls: 'I'm Like Any Parent'

Ryan Reynolds has no problem confessing to learning from some "brutal" parenting mistakes.

On Tuesday, Reynolds, 45, sat down for a discussion called "Creativity at the Pace of Culture" at Cannes, during which he joked about his "wild" three daughters. The actor shares Betty, 2, Ines, 5, and James, 7, with wife Blake Lively.

"I'm a parent of three girls. They're wild. I think they have rabies sometimes," he said.

Reynolds reflected on learning from his behavior as a parent and his relationships with each of his daughters. "I'm like any parent — I'll have a moment where I'll just snap," he admitted. "It's not so much what you do in the moment that's interesting, it's what you do afterwards."

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The Deadpool star said that his "brutal mistakes" in life have given him insight and inspired him more than any of his professional successes.

"I used to tell my kids, 'Don't waste your mistakes,' " he said. "When you're making mistakes it's easy to be absorbed by shame and this idea that you've done something wrong, but you also have to look at it critically and use it as a stepping stone to learning something profound."

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In the recently released fourth season of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, Reynolds talked about his family life with Lively and the girls. "Blake runs the show, I would kind of really phone things in if it wasn't for her," he admitted.

Letterman then askd Reynolds if "anxiety would set in" if Lively was out of town visiting her family and he was left to care for the children on his own.

"I would, first off, never let her go visit her family," Reynolds teased, getting a laugh from the former-late night talk show host.

"If I was just with the girls, I think I would find it pretty exciting at first," he continues. "And then there would be, with three girls, so, that division of labor is very important."

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Lively, 34, and Reynolds first met on the set of Green Lantern in 2010 but did not develop a romantic relationship until a year later. The pair wed in September 2012 and became parents for the first time in December 2014, when James was born.

Last December, Reynolds spoke with LinkedIn News Senior Editor at Large Jessi Hempel about taking a break from acting, citing his kids as his motivation.

"The biggest thing for me, and I know you have kids as well, is that I don't want to miss this time with my kids," he shared.

Reynolds later said he simply wants to "live life like a normal human," stating, "I want my kids to have a pretty normal schedule. For many years when my wife Blake would shoot a film, I would not shoot a film and I would be with the kids and vice versa. So we would sort of trade-off. We never really worked at the same time. But always we were away. So the kids were away too."

That lifestyle has become challenging as their children get older, he explained. "Now that they're in school, they have a somewhat normal schedule. I think it's totally important for their development and I really enjoy being a present dad. I love taking them to school in the morning, I love picking them up."