“Kids are being told by the world that they need to be absolute about something,” he told E! about what he hopes children and parents get out of Just Because. “You know, ‘What are you gonna do? What are you gonna be like?’ ‘Whoa, I’m a kid. Let me try some things out.’ Or, you know, ‘I’m excited about this, but I’m nervous and I’m confused, I feel both these things.'”
And, McConaughey continued, “That’s cool. You can have dueling feelings. You can feel one way today about something and tomorrow feel a different way about the same situation. This starts to confuse us and confuse young people. It’s saying ‘Hey, that’s okay. That’s part of the poetry of living.’ So there’s a proper leniency in here I think will allow access for parents to talk to their kids and for kids to talk to their parents and say, ‘Well, tell me about a situation you’re in like that in your life, Mom, Dad’—and it opens the conversation to say, ‘Hey, life’s a lyric, it’s poetry to live it.'”
As he wrote in Greenlights, “life is our résumé.” And he’ll keep acquiring experience—but, as a dad, he’s already got the top job.
Read on to see Matthew McConaughey’s sweetest family photos: