Drew Barrymore Describes School Mornings With Her Daughters in Four Words & Every Parent Will Recognize Them

Oct 21, 2026 by apost team

An audience member on “The Drew Barrymore Show” asked Drew Barrymore a question that every working parent asks themselves: are your mornings as chaotic as mine? Barrymore did not hesitate.

“Oh my god, they are a s--- show,” she said. Four words. No qualifications.

She then immediately followed up with the kind of sentence that makes the answer feel useful rather than bleak. “It is only getting better now that they are 12 and 14. In fact, I woke up this morning, and I was like, ‘They’re getting themselves dressed.’”

Barrymore shares daughters Olive, 14, and Frankie, 12, with her ex-husband Will Kopelman. She and Kopelman divorced in 2016 and by all accounts have maintained a warm coparenting arrangement — attending Halloween trick-or-treating together, school events, and family occasions. The mornings, it turns out, have been the harder challenge.

“They say big kids big problems; they’re not wrong,” she told the audience. But mornings are improving. The turning point came when she stopped waiting for perfection and built a simple system instead. She began setting out her daughters’ shoes and backpacks in the same spot in the hallway every morning and encouraging the girls to do the same. When they didn’t, she let it go. “I would try to encourage them to do it, and if they didn’t, I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m not gonna stand on ceremony that you didn’t do it.’”

The shoes in the hallway became the whole philosophy. She did not know about systems before. She figured it out. “Whatever works for you, do it,” she said.

It is, as parenting advice goes, about as honest as it gets.

Barrymore has been uncommonly candid across her career about the specific challenges of parenting without a script — in part because her own childhood, spent largely without consistent parenting, means she arrived at motherhood without a model to copy.

“All those parents who have it all together, and they’ve got hygiene and nutrition and schedules and boundaries, God bless you,” she told a podcast. “I didn’t know any of that stuff when I had my kids.”

What she has built instead is a parenting style that runs on warmth, honesty, and a tolerance for imperfection she has developed by necessity over time. “I talk to my kids,” she has said. “And I do try to show them that the more you work on yourself, the happier you’re going to be, the more your friendships will thrive. We all need tools to navigate the world, and asking for help is everything.”

She started in this industry, as she has said more than once, “in diapers.” Her childhood was not conventional by any standard. The home she is building for Olive and Frankie — with school mornings and hallway systems and an ex-husband who comes trick-or-treating — is the one she designed to be as different from her own as possible. Her parenting philosophy, she has said simply, is: “If they are good, cool people, that’s all I care about.”

The mornings are still a s--- show. She says so herself, without apology. And then she says they are getting better. And then she says the girls dressed themselves this morning. And you realize that is what the whole story is about.

apost.com

Are you a fan of Drew Barrymore? Do you think her honesty about the chaos of school mornings is one of the most relatable things a celebrity parent has said in years? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and other fans out there!