The One Thing Tom Hanks' Kids Never Felt Despite His Parenting 'Mistakes'

Tom Hanks is a dad of four: two kids from his marriage to Samantha Lewes, and two from his marriage to Rita Wilson. His oldest child, Colin Hanks, was born in 1977, and after decades of parenting experience, he admits that it hasn't been easy. "I made every mistake," Hanks informed the "On Purpose with Jay Shetty" podcast in October 2024. "As they get older, you come back around. I said, 'Hey, can I talk about what a knot head I was with you for all those years?'"

Hanks went on to share one instance where he had to cancel plans to play baseball with his youngest, Truman Hanks. To Hanks' chagrin, he got distracted by other things until it was too dark for them to go out and play. The actor apologized profusely to his son and expressed concern that Truman had felt bored. "He looked at me . . . and said, 'Dad, I'm never bored,'" Hanks recalled to Shetty.

To his delight, Hanks discovered his other kids feel similarly. "They've always had some action thing that was going on, whether I understood their passion for it or not," he added. In 2015, Hanks publicly praised his son Chet Hanks (aka Chet Haze) for becoming a rap artist. "What I love about my kid is that he's doing it," Hanks proclaimed, per Page Six. "There's a lot of people who sit around for the phone to ring and wait for someone to invite them to do it."

When Tom Hanks was a young child, his parents divorced. As they married other people, Hanks frequently moved into different homes and gained a lot of experience living in a blended family. While his parents had been stricter with their older kids, in their post-divorce lives, Hanks didn't have a ton of supervision, like making sure he ate a healthy dinner or practiced good dental hygiene.

After becoming a parent himself, Hanks has observed that his two older kids had a different experience from his younger two, due to his stunning transformation to acting fame. Regardless, he took an individualistic approach to parenting each of them. He also relied on trial and error. "I learned through a process of elimination: learning what not to do as opposed to what to do as a dad," Hanks explained to "In Depth with Graham Bensinger."

In addition, he also struggled when he and his first wife divorced. Hanks worried that the emotional fallout of the situation would be harmful to his kids. Fortunately, over the years, Hanks has developed a crucial philosophy for combatting any parenting missteps. "The only thing really, I think, eventually a parent can do is say I love you, there's nothing you can do wrong, you cannot hurt my feelings, I hope you will forgive me on occasion, and what do you need me to do?" Hanks informed The New York Times.