Raised as an only child, there are certain sibling behaviors that are foreign to Kerry Washington when it comes to watching the interactions between her own children. The 48-year-old actress has to look to her husband to know if her children’s arguments and rivalries are “normal” behavior. 

“The thing I’m grateful for is how close they all are, the three of them, because I don’t know anything about siblings,” Washington said in a recent interview on an episode of Netflix’s Skip Intro podcast. “When they argue or fight, I always look to my husband, like ‘Is this normal?’”

“For me, you avoid conflict, right?” she continued. “And, I’m learning to witness them kind of work through stuff and how wonderful that is that none of them is the only [and] has to carry the burden of being everything all the time.”

The Scandal alum is very open about keeping her children and family life out of the public eye. In a recent interview with Bustle Magazine Washington tells the outlet that this decision is a very conscious one.

“Yeah. BN — Before Nnamdi — I was in a very public relationship and engagement, like I was on the cover of a bridal magazine. When that relationship ended, I thought, Going forward, I need to have a different kind of boundary, so that my relationships can belong to me. So even in the years of dating after that, I was very private, which was good, because those were my wild years.”

She continued, “When I met my husband, he was also very private. It was a shared value. We started dating right before Scandal, and he had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated. We both wanted to protect our relationship. By the time people started talking trash, we were happily married and pregnant. He was massaging my feet while we were laughing about some story on the internet about him partying at the Super Bowl without me. We’d built so much trust that those attacks didn’t put a dent in what we’d created together.”

Washington added that she wants her children to be old enough to make their own decisions about being in the public eye when they are older.

“I want them to make decisions about [that] when their brains are fully developed. I’m not making it for them. They didn’t choose to be born into the public eye.”

The Six Triple Eight actress shares two children, daughter Isabelle, 10, son Caleb, 8, and a stepdaughter with her husband, retired NFL player and actor, Nnamdi Asomugha.

Photo: Kerry Washington Instagram