Angelina Jolie’s children grew up with a lavish lifestyle, thanks to their mother’s massive net worth. The Tomb Raider actor didn’t exactly grow up with the same luxuries as her children. But she still considered herself well taken care of thanks to her famous parents Jon Voight and the late Marcheline Bertrand. However, Jolie spent much of her younger years going through a rebellious streak. She might’ve avoided this if she took on the joys of charity work much earlier.

How charity work could’ve changed a much younger Angelina Jolie

Fans know Jolie for her work in charity as much as her Hollywood career. She credited filming the movie Tomb Raider with changing her life by offering her a different perspective of the world. Jolie had to travel to Cambodia to film the video-game adaptation. Once there, she found an innate curiosity about humanity that shaped her for years to come.

“I realized there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand. And I was very humbled by it,” Jolie once said in an interview with Tuscaloosa News.

Since then, she’s supported human rights for citizens all over the globe. Between raising awareness about many issues and donating to nonprofit organizations, Jolie has worked tirelessly to improve the world. Perhaps Jolie’s only regret about her generous lifestyle is that she didn’t learn about it sooner. Jolie admitted she wasn’t the happiest or most stable child growing up.

Her attitude back then was a mystery even to her since she acknowledged she was raised in more privileged circumstances than many children. But she theorized that her behavior was an ironic symptom of her rich environment.

“I grew up in LA, where focus is very inward. I didn’t know why I was so destructive and miserable. I didn’t appreciate or understand my life,” she said in a 2015 interview with the WSJ. “I was raised in a place where if you have fame and money and you’re decent-looking and have the ability to work in this industry, you have everything in the world. Then you attain those things and realize you still couldn’t be more empty. I didn’t know where to put myself.”

Jolie believed that getting into charity work might’ve been the solution she needed back then. “I think it would have got me through my youth easier,” Jolie once told Today. “I would have been less self-destructive.”

Angelina Jolie hopes her children will benefit from her humanitarian efforts

Jolie felt she had the opportunity to give her children the lessons she didn’t receive at their age. But her kids already had a different upbringing by virtue of how they came into the world. The Oscar winner adopted three of her children from orphanages in different countries. This allowed her family to develop cultural diversity, teaching her kids as much about the world as their global travels did.

“I think my children have learned the most about these issues simply from each other, from experiencing each other. They are from different backgrounds, they don’t deny the difference; they celebrate the difference,” Jolie once said in an interview with BBC Radio 4 (via E! News).

Ideally, Jolie hoped that her charitable endeavors and humanitarian efforts would rub off on her children and inform their characters.

“I want them to see it as an area where they can go down the street and play football with those kids and get to know them and, as they grow up, see them as friends they spend time with,” she said. “I hope if I raise them with a more accurate view of the world than I was raised with, then they will naturally be better people. And I’m sure my children will be visiting and learning from refugees in the future.”