Ange's New Start: Brad Mad A Better

A More Balanced Angelina Is Taking Tips From Her Ex’s Parenting Playbook

- Amber Bramble

Opening up before her shock split from Brad Pitt last year, Angelina Jolie admitted, ‘Brad and I have our issues.’ And one of those issues was an inability to agree on how to best raise their six kids. ‘Brad wants them to have a normal upbringing and worries that they’ll come out spoiled, elitist and not grounded,’ a family confidant once said. ‘But Angie feels they should be “children of the world”. They argue about it all the time: heated, screaming fights.’

But though the pair clashed while they were together – Ange admitting Brad had to ‘play bad cop’ more often after the twins’ birth – things could be changing now they’re apart. Lately, Ange seems to have taken a new approach to raising their tribe, after she was spotted taking her four youngest for a family trip to the historic La Brea Tar Pits in LA on May 25.

The actress seemed relaxed and upbeat as Zahara, 12, Shiloh and eight-year-old twins Knox and Vivienne chatted with a group of friends who had come all the way from Cambodia to help Shiloh celebrate her 11th birthday. The children bonded when the Brangie bunch (which also includes Maddox, 15, and Pax, 13) were in Cambodia, where Ange was shooting her Netflix drama First They Killed My Father. ‘[My] children have close ties to the children here,’ she said at the film’s premiere. ‘Many of them are best friends.’

Now it looks like Ange is intent on making sure her little ones maintain those bonds.

But rather than having them traipse around the world and disturb their routine as she once would have, Ange treated the Cambodian friends to a special trip Stateside.