“The thing about parenting is you never know if anything you’re doing is working,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “That’s been the most humbling thing for me. In my head, I sound amazing and then I turn around and her eyes are completely glazed over. I have no idea. We’ll see.”
Currently on her Beautiful Trauma tour, Pink, 38, describes her own upbringing in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, as “free range, I guess.”
“My mum worked full time and went to school full time. My dad was an insurance salesman,” she says. “My brother and I rode bikes to school and played in thewoods all day. Lots of rescuing animals, tree climbing, sports, gymnastics. I had a good childhood.”
With her own kids, she has embraced more of an attachment parenting style. “Yeah, I believe in affection,” she says. “I believe in needs being met and faith being implemented, and I believe in letting your kids know they can count on you, and that you’ll be there. My parents obviously did not believe in that and I worked out okay. I always tell Willow, ‘I’m going to teach you the rules so that you’ll know how and when to break them.’ ”
The singer also strives to create a gender-neutral environment for her brood. “Absolutely. [But] I feel like gender-neutral is in itself a label and I’m label-less,” she says. “I don’t like labels at all so I believe that a woman and a girl can do anything.”
More than anything, Pink says she believes in “fairness and justice. And I believe that a boy can do anything. So I have boys that flip dirt bikes and I have boy friends that wear dresses. It’s all okay to me. It’s whatever floats your boat. So that’s the kind of house that we live in.”
As for her children’s future, Pink is more concerned with “just the world that we live in,” she says. “I have so many worries and fears as a parent. I’m such a worrier. They’re going to be fine. They chose this family. They know what they’re doing. But the world, I don’t know if the world’s going to be fine, and so I pray a lot. I cry a lot. I talk to them a lot. I hope a lot. I curse a lot.”
For now, she and Hart, 42, “try not to take life too terribly seriously,” Pink adds. “We laugh a lot. It’s all about our family unit and time spent together, and much less about external stuff.”
