Ryan Reynolds Gives Rare Glimpse Of His Daughter's Long Hair For Blake Lively's Birthday
August 25, 2026, marked "Gossip Girl" star Blake Lively's 39th birthday. Her Marvel actor husband, Ryan Reynolds, was sure to mark the occasion on social media, offering a rare glimpse at his and Lively's four children — such as in a sweet snapshot featuring of one of their daughters, who certainly seems to take after her mother in the hair department.
"August 25th is this family's Super Bowl," Reynolds wrote in a post to Instagram, adding, "Happy Birthday to the very best human I know. You're not just another courageous and deeply kind genius. You're also unreasonably cute. I know how lucky I am that you were born. Every time I've ever hit my head, it's YOUR life that flashes before my eyes." One of the photos in the carousel shows Lively hugging one of their daughters, either James, Inez, or Betty, whose hair rivals the "It Ends with Us" actor's own long, blond locks.
Not unlike other celebrity couples, such as Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, Reynolds and Lively make it a point to keep their kids out of the spotlight as much as possible. Also like Timberlake and Biel, however, they do occasionally make exceptions when celebrating family events and milestones on social media.
Ryan Reynolds has spoken at length about his parenting style
According to Ryan Reynolds, his and Blake Lively's efforts to keep their children largely out of the public eye stems from their desire to make sure that they have as normal an upbringing as they possibly can, given their extraordinary circumstances. That being said, Reynolds has also stated that he's had to make a conscious effort to avoid projecting his own, less privileged childhood onto his kids.
"I try not to impose upon them the difference in their childhood to my childhood or my wife's childhood," Reynolds told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2024, adding, "We both grew up very working class, and I remember when they were very young, I used to say or think, like, 'Oh God, I would never have had a gift like this when I was a kid' ... Then I realized that that's not really their bag of rocks to carry." At the time, Reynolds also noted that while his kids live far more lavishly than he did at their age, he feels that he and Lively have done well at nurturing positive values, and not spoiling them too much. "They're already very much in touch with gratitude and understanding the world enough to have a strong sense of empathy," he said.
Regarding just how different his upbringing was from that of his children, the "Deadpool & Wolverine" star has also made no secret of the fact that he's adopted a parenting style that couldn't be more different from the ones that were most pervasive during his youth. "Soft parenting is new, right? I didn't have that. There's not a lot of yelling or punishments or anything like that," Reynolds said at the CMO Summit in New York in November 2025 (via People).