Hilary Duff Opens Up About Becoming A Mom At 24 In A Refreshingly Candid Interview

Hilary Duff is a happy mom of two. The 31-year-old actress has a 7-year-old son Luca and an 8-month-old daughter named Banks, and based on her social media alone, they're all just loving life. But despite her aww-worthy Instagram page, she also struggles, just like every other parent. In fact, in a new interview with The Motherly Podcast, Duff opened up about becoming a mom at 24 years old and shared how that experience affected her at the time and as a parent today.

Duff and her ex-husband, Mike Comrie, welcomed their son, Luca Cruz Comrie, into the world on March 20, 2012, according to The Hollywood Reporter. And clearly, a lot of things have changed in the following years. Although she and Comrie split in 2015, she ended up giving birth to her first daughter with boyfriend Matthew Koma in October 2018, and got engaged to him a year later. Although those days of first time motherhood might seem like a lifetime ago to Duff, she is now opening up about how she felt at the time.

During her appearance on The Motherly Podcast this week, Duff stated that her perception on motherhood was a bit different when she got pregnant at the age of 23 — all of a sudden, she was forced to become an adult. "I guess I thought like you're a real adult once you have a baby," she said on the podcast. "But that looked very different than how I looked...I guess I'm saying it in a very simple way, but I very much felt like myself and a little fearful that I wasn't going to have all the answers...it looked like maybe an older person's job to be a parent."

Not only did becoming a mom at 24 force her to change her perception of certains things, it also made her feel lonely because of the fact that she was so young when she welcomed her son..

"It was a little isolating in the beginning because I didn't have any friends that had babies yet," she said on the podcast. "But I had been working for such a long time that it felt like a natural step for me and I always knew I wanted to be a mom. I always knew that was going to be my number one priority in life."

And it has become the number one priority in her life. Despite being a super busy actress, and the star of TVLand's hit show, Younger, Duff has found the time to perfectly balance motherhood and her two kids. This, combined with her seven years of experience of being a mom could be why Duff said on The Motherly Podcast that things were different when it came time to give birth to Banks.

"With Banks, I was so much older and had kind of a different support system around me and I feel much more in tune with my body and I'm a lot healthier I think than I was then," she said. "I just wanted to try. I did a lot of research."

Although some people might have been surprised to learn how isolated Duff felt after giving birth to Luca, this wasn't the first time she has opened up about this subject. In 2013, just one year after she had Luca, Duff told HuffPost that becoming a mother was a life-changing experience. "You just don't even know until you have a child what that bond does, and how it changes you, and what you learn," she said at the time. "But it is also a big struggle. It's the hardest thing as well. You're exhausted. You don't have all the answers no matter how many books you've read."

Clearly Duff was just a little more prepared when it came time to giving birth to Banks, but it also took her many years of motherhood to get to here where she is today.