Demi Moore's rare comments about her childhood: 'it was lunacy'

Demi Moore is known as the loving mom to her three daughters, Rumer , Scout and Tallulah , whom she shares with ex-husband Bruce Willis . Her children in fact often gush about how much they love their mother.

But while her three daughters may have been lucky enough to be born into a wealthy and stable environment, it's far different from Demi's own upbringing. The star opened up about her boundaryless childhood.

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"Both of our parents let us take the car without drivers' licenses at 13," Demi told Drew Barrymore on her show. "Driving on the freeway, my parents would say 'OK here's the deal you can take the car. If you get stopped, you just have to say you took the car without permission.' And they saw that as a win-win for everybody, but that is lunacy."

While the eyebrow-raising story was just a sample of many from Demi's childhood, she approaches her past pragmatically.

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"My parents did the best they could, my mom did the best she could with the level of consciousness and awareness that she had at the time," she said. "But we were both more the parents to our parents."

The actress continued that she had managed to approach her own mom with enough empathy, that she hoped her children might give her that same level of understanding.

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"I don't think my mother came into this world with the intention to be less than nurturing, to be neglectful, to not really be able to show up as a parent for me. I think she came in with the innocence of a soul that wanted to find happiness, feel love and belong," she explained.

Demi concluded: "When I look and find the compassion for my mother, I know that in that, I open the pathway for my children to have compassion for me."

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Indeed, Demi's mom had her own complicated history, as her mother was 18 when she had her, married to her father, Charles Foster Harmon Sr, who reportedly deserted his wife after two months before the actress was born.

It was when Demi was three months old, that her mom married Dan Guynes, who worked in newspaper advertising and regularly changed jobs. This meant her childhood involved moving about a lot. She found out that Dan was not her real father aged 13, but has stated: "My dad is Dan Guynes. He raised me. There is a man who would be considered my biological father who I don't really have a relationship with," she told Vanity Fair in 1991.

Demi's mom and stepfather married and divorced twice, and a year after, her stepfather reportedly died by suicide. Her own mother allegedly had a history of drunk driving and arson, and Demi cut off ties with her in 1989. The mother-daughter duo reconciled shortly before her mom died of a brain tumor in 1998.