Henry Winkler shares parenting wisdom after Father’s Day surprise

Henry Winkler is sharing wisdom he’s gained from five decades of parenting.

The “Happy Days” star appeared on the “Today” show this week, where he was shown a surprise Father’s Day video message from his children that he admitted left him feeling “so emotional.”

In the video, his daughter Zoe, 45, said, “The way you were raised and in the household you came from, where you weren’t allowed to be yourself and you weren’t allowed to question or speak your mind. You did the exact opposite, and you raised us in the most loving home where we could be ourselves.”

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“Fifty years of incredible memories, which is unbelievable,” Jed, Winkler’s wife’s son from a previous marriage, noted, while son Max, 41, said, “I wish you the happiest, happiest Father’s Day, and I love you so much.”

When the video finished playing, Winkler was seen tearing up as he profusely thanked the team who put the clips of his children together.

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Henry Winkler and wife Stacey Weitzman share two children: Zoe, pictured here, and Max. (Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for This Is About Humanity)

“Today” host Jenna Bush Hager, who was so touched that she began crying herself, asked him, “What did you do to raise such beautiful children?”

“I’m going to tell you now, I think that the center of all relationships … is the ear,” he answered. “It is not how you meant it, it is how it landed. It’s how it’s heard.”

He continued, “And I was never able to say anything. I never had a point of view growing up … and my children could say what was on their mind.”

Winkler has spoken in the past about the difficulties he faced growing up. His parents, two Jewish immigrants who had fled Nazi Germany for New York City, were very hard on him.

Henry Winkler played Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, also known as The Fonz or Fonzie on “Happy Days” for eleven seasons. (ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

As he explained last year on the “How To Fail” podcast with host Elizabeth Day, he doesn’t think “strict” was the proper term to describe them – he said that he was a strict parent himself, but his own parents “did not see me … my parents did not acknowledge who I was as a human being.”

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He acknowledged that they “went through a trauma,” but said “They literally saw me as an extension to making them grander. I had to do well. If I didn’t do well, I embarrassed them. That is a tragedy, it is one of the no-nos of being a parent – you have to see the child in front of you, you have to hear the child in front of you … if you see your child is having a problem, it is your job to make sure you don’t let that child’s self-image plummet to the bottom of the ocean.”

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Although he didn’t have a name for it until he was an adult, Winkler struggled with dyslexia throughout his childhood, and he continues to struggle with it. In 2020, he told Howard Stern that his parents called him the German word for “dumb dog.”

When he became a father, he admitted, “I didn’t know if I could be a parent, I just knew that I was duty-bound, and I was going to get this right. Of course, you know you never get it right … you try.”

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