George Clooney has jokingly revealed the “dumb” parenting mistake he and wife Amal Clooney made with their three-year-old twins Alexander and Ella.
On Tuesday, the actor appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! where he explained that the couple’s young children know how to speak fluent Italian, but that he and his wife do not.
“We did a really dumb thing which is, they speak fluent Italian," The Midnight Sky star told Kimmel. "I mean fluent Italian at three. But I don't speak Italian, my wife doesn't speak Italian, so we've armed them with a language."
Acknowledging that it’s “terrible,” Clooney said the language divide makes it difficult to get the children to do chores such as cleaning their rooms.
"I'll say: ‘Go back in and clean your room,’ and they'll be like: 'Eh, papa stranzo,'" the 59-year-old said, before joking that he’s “from Kentucky so English is a second language to me.”
During the interview, Clooney also opened up about how his life has changed during the pandemic, revealing that he’s had to do household chores such as laundry, mopping and dishes, and even “wood-stained the entire house”.
As for whether he did a successful job, the father-of-two told Kimmel: “Probably not, but I was busy for a while. It kept me out of the room with the kids speaking Italian."
However, according to Clooney, quarantine has not had a major impact on how much time he spends with the couple’s children, as he previously told People that he’d started working less before the pandemic so he could be with his family more.
“I haven’t been working as much as I had before we had the kids, so I had every intention of focusing on them [anyway], putting them to bed at night and stuff, so we didn’t need to be forced into that by a pandemic,” he told the outlet.
He is grateful that his and Amal’s twins are young, however, as it means the couple does not have to homeschool them amid the pandemic.
“I’m lucky because our kids are three, so I don’t have to homeschool trigonometry,” he added. “I can survive with just spending time with them.”
