VIDEO: Tom Brady Admits ‘I Screwed Up A Lot As A Parent’

In a sit-down interview at the Fortun Global Summitt, NFL legend Tom Brady shared what is most important to him as a father.

After a brief 40-day retirement in 2022, Brady definitively retired in February 2023, intending to spend more time with his family.

Brady explained the lifestyle shift he has undergone since he retired from the field. “As an athlete, we can’t play forever, and I think all those experiences I had changed me In a positive way. [Now] I get to be around great people that are doing great things in the community, we’re trying to make a positive difference,” he said. “Like I said, there’s a physical component to [athletes] being the best we can be…and then there’s an emotional component: how are we dealing with the stresses of our everyday life that still enable us to get out there and be the leaders that we want to be…it’s a huge challenge to go from, as an athlete, using your body to kind of get the job done, and now I have to use my eyes and my voice, which is very new to me, so I really enjoy that.”

Prompted for parenting advice, Brady laughed, “All the parents in the room know that being a parent is probably the hardest job all of us have, and we screw up a lot – and I’ve screwed up a lot as a parent, so I don’t want to seem like I’m some expert in parenting because I’m certainly not that.”

He said, “I have three amazing kids, and I just try to be dependable and consistent for them, and honestly whatever our kids choose…whatever they want to do in life, we gotta support them.”

Brady expressed, “The blessing my parents gave me was when I was that long-shot as a kid, who was a backup quarterback on a freshmen team, they never said, ‘Yeah, don’t do that, it’s going to be too hard, let’s do something different, let’s think about another backup plan,’ they kind of said, ‘Go for it.’ And that’s probably my parenting style.”

He shared, “I have a son who is 6’5” and wants to play basketball … he’s 17, and unfortunately, he jumps as high as I do, but I tell him, ‘Dude, you’re going to be a stud, wait until you hit your growth spurt’ And whether he does or not, who cares. But I want him to know that his dad’s got his back.”

Brady also communicated his awareness of the specific challenges his sons face: “To be a boy, it sucks to be Tom Brady’s son in so many ways, and I try to empathize that with them.”

He said, “My kids naturally are going to be faced with their own challenges and they gotta figure out how to overcome them too, and I’ll be there to support them a lot like my parents did.”