Marky Mark (aka Mark Wahlberg) Shares His Thoughts on Raising Four Children

Marky Mark sure has come a long way since his Funky Bunch days!

The actor (who now goes by his given name Mark Wahlberg) is a dad of four with 10 years of parenting experience under his belt.”I think the most important thing is to always be involved in every aspect of their life,” the 42-year-old says of his approach to fatherhood.

“To give them enough trust that they can share things with you. I don’t want them to be terrified of me, you know? But I don’t want them to think they can do whatever they want and get away with it, either, because they can’t,” he added.

Luckily, he has wife Rhea Durham to help him with Ella, 10, Michael, 8, Brendan, 5, and Grace, 4. But Mark admits he struggles with how to raise his children in a privileged home, considering his humble beginnings.

“I think, for the most part, I had a pretty good childhood. It wasn’t until we got older that we realized we didn’t have what a lot of other people had,” Mark said of his working-class Boston upbringing.

“The biggest thing for me is, you know, as quickly as I was able to turn it around, to get from there to here, from me having nothing as a kid to me here now, providing everything for my kids, it’s like, I worry that maybe they won’t appreciate things,” he continues.

“I worry that maybe they’ll have a sense of entitlement. You don’t wanna give your kids everything without giving them the tools to be great people.”

With that in mind, the actor recently made an effort to earn his high school equivalency diploma online, after dropping out of school in his teens.

“I can’t tell my kids to go to school and get an education if I don’t have a diploma,” The Fighter star reasons. “They’d start thinking, ‘Why do we need to go? You didn’t go and you turned out all right.’

“But I’m proud to have it,” Mark tells Esquire magazine. “If I want to go on and further my education and study film or whatever, I can do that.”