Gwyneth Paltrow Says Stepdaughter Izzy Has ‘Taught Me So Much About Love’

Gwyneth Paltrow is sending a sweet message to her stepdaughter on her birthday.

The Goop founder, 52, shared a photo on her Instagram Stories over the weekend in honor of her stepdaughter Izzy’s 21st birthday. Paltrow, who is stepmom to husband Brad Falchuk’s daughter and son Brody, said her stepdaughter has “taught me so much about love” in her birthday tribute.

“Happy birthday my snizzle,” Paltrow wrote over a photo of Izzy smiling and wearing sunglasses. “You have taught me so much about love. I am lucky to be your stepmom. @izzyfalchuk.”

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On an April episode of The goop Podcast, Paltrow and her Glee creator husband spoke about their experience blending their families after they tied the knot in 2018. Paltrow shares daughter Apple, 21, and son Moses, 19, with ex-husband Chris Martin, while Falchuk is dad to daughter Izzy and Brody, 18, whom he shares with ex-wife Suzanne Bukinik.

“I just remember before the boys left for college, the night before. I think somebody was going, one of the girls was going first,” Falchuk said toward the end of their podcast episode. “So it was like the last night, and it happened to be on a Wednesday. We had a last Wednesday night dinner.”

“And I don’t think the kids said two words to us because they were so…yapping with each [other] and having such a good time, and we were sitting at them just looking over at them being like, ‘Oh my gosh. It worked,’ ” Falchuk remembered.

“It worked, right? But we would never have believed it would have worked — it was gonna work — early on,” he added. “But with that consistency and with the belief in what the truth was, worked for us.”

On another episode of her podcast, Paltrow opened up about the topic of becoming a stepmom while speaking with Falchuk about parenting, admitting there’s one thing she regrets doing at the time.

“It’s funny because there’s just no playbook for how to do it and nobody says, ‘Hey, you’re going to be a stepmother,’ ” Paltrow said about learning how to stepparent. “I don’t know, I think there’s like this archetypal evil stepmother and this inference that it’s going to be this fraught thing, so I think I came into it on tenterhooks, like, ‘Oh my Gosh.’ ”

“It’s like you can only kind of do the wrong thing, especially because your kids were more resistant,” she added.

Falchuk, on his part, admitted that his kids were indeed hesitant about ditching their “great little pack” when he and Paltrow married. He added that he and his wife have both noted throughout their marriage, however, that her own “hesitancy” about the situation “probably freaked them out, too.”

“That’s my only regret,” Paltrow said about the adjustment to living as a stepparent. “Is that whenever it was, however many years ago, when I was just like, ‘F— it, these are my kids, I love them. I’m not going to be scared to discipline them or draw the boundary.’ That’s really what shifted everything, I feel like.”