John Legend says he and Chrissy Teigen are teaching their daughter Luna to not be ‘competitive’ about beauty

• John Legend says he wants to teach his kids that beauty is not a competition.
• He explained that "everybody's pretty and everyone's beautiful in their own way."
• He said he wants to instill "values of being kind, being loving" in his kids with Chrissy Teigen.
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John Legend and Chrissy Teigen are making it a point to challenge societal beauty standards and teach their two children to embrace individual beauty.

On Monday's episode with People's Every Day podcast, Legend admitted that it's been challenging to protect his children, Luna, 5, and Miles, 2, from the effects of pervasive beauty standards, but explained that he and Teigen want them to understand everyone is unique.

"I want to teach them about not being competitive about the way they look," he said. "That's a challenge because even at the age of 5, Luna was asking me the other day, 'Who do you think is prettier between this and that person?'"

The "All of Me" singer went on to express his feelings toward beauty, saying, "It's not really up to me to decide who's prettier. Everybody's pretty and everyone's beautiful in their own way. They're just different from each other and what's different is what makes you special."

However, he is aware that his positive message for his could get lost in a rapidly growing digital age.

"There's also so many messages out there that are gonna contradict that and so you don't know that you can protect them from the idea that we should compete on beauty," he added.

Legend also explained on the podcast that Teigen's challenges with social media have affected his perception of how women's bodies are judged online. She recently took a break from Twitter due to online negativity, and has been body-shamed on the platform. In April 2020, she shared a video of herself in a swimsuit, which was met with comments criticizing the shape of her body, which she later called "super mean."

"Particularly being with Chrissy and seeing some of the challenges that she has been dealing with social media, it's been hard for women because there's a lot more scrutiny on the way they look and people feel much more comfortable being mean to them than they do to a man," Legend said.

Legend said he has grown to empathize and actively support women by witnessing and hearing the experiences of the "brilliant, interesting, powerful" women in his life, and this echoes the values he'd like his children to possess.

"We're going to try to give them values of being kind, being loving, and putting positivity out into the world," he said.