Zoë Saldana Says She's Raising Her Three Sons in a 'Gender-Fluid Environment'
Zoë Saldana isn’t subscribing to gender stereotypes.
The Avengers: Infinity War star opened up to PEOPLE Thursday during the American Express Simplify Your Summer event, celebrating the launch of the new Cash Magnet Card, at Milk Studios in N.Y.C., explaining that the Time’s Up movement has changed her “for the better” in parenting her sons: Zen Anton Hilario, 18 months, and 3½-year-old twins Cy Aridio and Bowie Ezio.
“When you look at parenting, the whole thing about matriarchy and patriarchy, and Daddy’s little girl and Mama’s boys — my husband [Marco Perego-Saldana] and I find that completely ludicrous and absolutely unhealthy for the upbringing of a child,” said Saldana, 40.
“You’re giving them a very distorted and limited view on what a female role is supposed to be in a family and what a male role is supposed to be,” she added.
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To combat these stereotypes, Saldana and her husband are “raising our kids in a very gender-fluid environment, where our roles are we swap back and forth,” she explained.
“He’s the bad cop, I’m the good cop and vice versa. There’s no such thing as, ‘Mom’s the boss, listen to your mother,’ ” the actress told PEOPLE. “No, listen to your father as much as your mother because we stand as a unit.”
“I think what’s very important in this Time’s Up movement is that a lot of these men that are abusers still have prominent female figures in their lives that raise them and either overlooked something that they shouldn’t have or encouraged something that they shouldn’t have in their sons,” she added. “Females’ mothers are just as much at fault as fathers would be, whether you were present or not in the distorted image that males have had of females.”
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Saldana also praised the “unity” she has seen come out of the Time’s Up movement — something she describes as a breath of fresh air compared to past treatment.
“Women, we were never encouraged by our societies or cultures to work as a team. We were always separated and raised to believe that you have to be competitive with other females,” said the star. “This unity is allowing the support that we all finally needed to move on and run businesses and be in positions of power.”
She continued, “But we have to grant those opportunities to other females once we find ourselves in those positions of power versus trying to be more like males and repeat the same bad patterns that males do. Females have to change that for each other.”
For more from Zoe Saldana, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday.
