Brooke Shields says the experience of watching her daughters Rowan, 22, and Grier, 18, grow into fully formed young women is nothing short of “bizarre” — and she means that as a compliment. In an exclusive conversation with People about her daughters becoming their own people and finding success, Shields captured what so many parents of emerging adults quietly feel but rarely say out loud.
For most of motherhood, Shields operated the way parents of young children do — setting the rules, managing the schedule, shaping the environment. But somewhere between childhood and adulthood, that dynamic shifts, and Shields has been candid about navigating that transition with both humor and honesty.
Speaking on TODAY with Jenna & Friends in 2025, she described the moment she realized the relationship with her daughters needed to evolve. “For your whole life, I’ve told you what to do, what to eat, when to eat, when not to eat, clothing, who’re your friends,” Shields said. “Now I’m meeting you, so you have got to give me a bit of a grace period so that I can get to know you as this young adult.”
That kind of radical honesty, asking her own children for patience as she figures out who they are now, reflects a parenting philosophy that many families reach but few articulate so directly. Shields is essentially describing a second introduction, a renegotiation of a relationship that has existed since birth but must be rebuilt on entirely new terms once a child steps into adulthood.
A Mother And Daughters In the Public Eye
Shields and Rowan turned heads during a recent New York City outing, arriving in matching black ensembles that drew attention as much for the unmistakable physical likeness between them as for their coordinated style. At 22, Rowan projects a confidence and presence that observers have noted echoes her mother’s, a visible reminder of just how quickly the children of public figures grow into their own identities.
For Shields, who has spent decades in the spotlight as an actress, author, and cultural figure, raising daughters in that same environment adds another layer of complexity to the already intricate work of letting go.
Shields is tapping into something deeply familiar to parents everywhere. There is a particular strangeness to realizing that the small people you once dressed, fed, and guided through every decision have become autonomous individuals with their own opinions, aesthetics, ambitions, and social worlds. It does not feel bad, it feels surreal.
Child development experts have long noted that the transition a parent undergoes when a child reaches emerging adulthood is its own psychological process, one that requires the parent to grieve the earlier relationship while simultaneously celebrating the new one. Shields seems to be doing exactly that, holding both the wonder and the weirdness of the moment at once.
‘Emotional Labor’ Discussions Are Gaining Traction
Shields’s reflections arrive at a time when conversations about the emotional labor of parenting adult children are gaining more cultural traction. The years between 18 and 25, what researchers call emerging adulthood, are a period of enormous change for both the young person and the parent.
Roles blur, communication styles have to adapt, and the parent must learn to offer support without control.
What Shields is describing is not a failure of the parent-child bond. It is the bond doing exactly what it is supposed to do: evolving. The fact that she finds it “bizarre” suggests she is paying close attention, and that attentiveness, more than any parenting strategy, is probably what her daughters will remember most.
There is something worth sitting with in the image of Brooke Shields, one of the most photographed women of her generation, walking through New York City beside a daughter who now looks remarkably like her, both of them dressed in their own versions of the same color.
It is a visual metaphor for what she is describing in words: two people who share so much, now figuring out where one ends and the other begins. That is not just a celebrity story. That is every parent’s story, eventually.
