Channing Tatum Shares Initial Struggles of Being a Single Girl Dad, Admits He Watched Tutorials on 'How to Braid Hair'

If it wasn't for Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan's divorce, the actor wouldn't be able to call himself a bestselling children's author!

The 21 Jump Street lead shared the revelation while on Today, where he dished about his third Sparkella book.

"I didn’t plan to be a single dad, that was not in the cards. And I was pretty nervous. I was like, ‘She’s a girl.’ I was like looking up YouTube on how to braid her hair. I didn’t want to be the dad who was bringing her to school looking like she had just slept on the street," he explained of adjusting to life on his own with daughter Everly, 10. "So this series of books kind of came from that. It was me really figuring out how to talk to a little girl."

Tatum, 43, noted he also didn't want to follow his father's more old-fashioned parenting style, which included threats of being spanked.

The Hollywood hunk confessed he wasn't exactly sure what he would label his own parenting habits as, but he's come to find that setting "house rules" and "boundaries" has helped both himself and the tot.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, the Magic Mike star revealed that becoming parents helped him and Dewan, 42, realize they weren't a perfect match.

"We fought for it for a really long time, even though we both sort of knew that we had sort of grown apart. I think we told ourselves a story when we were young, and we just kept telling ourselves that story, no matter how blatantly life was telling us that we were so different," he said of their divorce. "But when you're actually parents, you really understand differences between the two of you. Because it is screaming at you all day long. How you parent differently, how you look at the world, how you go through the world."

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Tatum and his Step Up costar have been amicably co-parenting Everly since they separated in 2018. The two married in 2009.