Tim McGraw Says Watching Daughters Grow up Is ‘a Beautiful Thing’ and ‘a Sad Thing at the Same Time’

Tim McGraw and Faith Hill share three daughters, Gracie, 23, Maggie, 22, and Audrey, 19, all of whom have now left McGraw and Hill’s home in Nashville. During a recent chat with Garrett Hedlund for Leo Edit, McGraw reflected on watching his daughters grow up, sharing that his years as a father have been bittersweet.

“Our youngest is 19 and living in New York City now, I mean, it’s crazy,” he said. “It goes by so fast. You think you’re giving them good life lessons. You know, as a parent — look, [laughs] you’re going to get half of everything wrong. That’s just the nature of it. There is no handbook with it. To look back now, over Faith [Hill] and I’s 25 years of marriage coming up in October, and see where we’re at and see where our kids are, see how fast it’s gone by, it’s almost… it’s unfathomable how time flies.”

“What starts happening is you start marking your time by their years,” he continued. “And the next thing you know, they grow so fast and it’s like every two years there’s a different child that you have as they age. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s a sad thing at the same time. You find yourself reflecting and looking back at pictures and thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, I remember that time, I remember when they looked like that.’ It’s so sweet; there’s some melancholy that goes along with it as they age.”

McGraw grew up in Louisiana and Hill and Mississippi, and McGraw shared that he and his wife were able to provide their daughters “a different kind of life, but we also gave them the best of both worlds in a sense.” “We tried our best to never be away from them,” he said. “They were on the road with us, they flew with us. If we had to go to Europe, they went to Europe with us. Whenever we were working, they were with us most of the time.”

Despite being two of country music’s biggest stars, McGraw and Hill stayed focused on parenting when they were home with their girls. “When they started school and when we were home, we didn’t talk about business,” McGraw recalled. “Their friends called us Mr. and Mrs. McGraw. They all knew us as Gracie’s dad, or Audrey’s dad, or Maggie’s dad. They sort of all grew up in the same community with the same friends. All their parents knew us. We were at PTA meetings. We were at football games. We were at basketball games. I coached softball. I coached basketball. We were part of their life, their community growing up. We made a real effort for them to not just to be part of our lives, but for us to be part of their lives.”