Gisele Bündchen on the ‘Pushback’ She Sometimes Gets From Her and Tom Brady’s Children

Gisele Bündchen knows the importance of giving her two children the tools they need to succeed.

In the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, the model shares how she is making sure that her and Tom Brady‘s two children, Benjamin, 14, and Vivian, 11, can move through life on their own.

“The way you make your room, the way you organize and make your bed is the way you’re going to do your life,” she says of the lessons she teaches her children, who are around the age she was when she left her home in Brazil to start her modeling career. 

“If you’re not learning here and now, then when and with who?” she adds.

The 43-year-old model, like any parent raising teens, admits that she does get pushback from her kids, as they are also navigating spending time in two homes, with different rules. 

“Sometimes, I get pushback, especially because now they’re in two different homes and there are two different ways,” she says. “But I feel like I owe it to my kids, because of what my mom taught me.”

Bündchen and Brady, 46, announced they were ending their marriage after 13 years in 2022. Since their divorce, the pair has been co-parenting their children. Brady is also the father of 16-year-old Jack, whom he shares with Bridget Moynahan.

Bündchen’s love of jiujitsu was also inspired by motherhood. After enrolling her children in the program for self-defense lessons, the author shares that she began training with brothers Joaquim, Pedro and Gui Valente in Miami.

“Here I think, ‘Oh, I’m going to just learn self-defense because I want to make sure my kids can protect themselves when they’re out in the world,’ but then I learned with the brothers the philosophy and the lifestyle, the whole value system, which was amazing,” she says of the training. 

“It was almost everything I lived in my life, the way I believed in courage and honesty and all the things I found to be important in my value system and have been guiding me in my life. They were never organized, and now they have a container,” she notes.

Bündchen does daily mediation, weight training and Pilates in addition to jiujitsu.

But even with all of the recent changes in her personal life and lifestyle, the model shares that it’s the simple things that bring her joy these days. 

“You are where you come from,” Bündchen says. “All those things that I learned as a kid are things that are in me. It doesn’t change. In many ways, it’s also what kept me safe, because my value system was so strong. Today, being in the place where I am in my life and having access to all the different things I’ve had access to, I feel like the simple things are best because I keep trying to go back to those things. At the end of the day, those are the things that make me the happiest.”

Another thing that brings her happiness? No longer worrying about what others have to say about her or her life. 

“I can’t really worry about what other people say about me because what they say about me is none of my business,” she tells the magazine. “It’s really their business that they’re trying to project onto me. If I’m going to be affected by that, I’m never going to live my truth.”

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