Miley Cyrus has opened up about her renewed relationship with her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, after years of estrangement, signaling a shift in how she views her parents and their past.
Speaking in a new interview with The New York Times, the pop star shared that her perspective on family has changed with age and maturity.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’m respecting my parents as individuals instead of as parents — because my mom really loved my dad for her whole life, and I think being married to someone in the music industry and not being a part of it is obviously really hard,” Miley said.
The 31-year-old singer acknowledged how deeply her mother, Tish Cyrus, was affected by the end of her marriage to Billy Ray, saying, “I took on some of my mom’s hurt as my own because it hurt her more than it hurt me as an adult, and so I owned a lot of her pain.”
Since their divorce in 2022, both Tish and Billy Ray have moved on. Tish recently married actor Dominic Purcell, known for his role in Prison Break, while Billy Ray is in a relationship with singer Elizabeth Hurley.
Miley expressed that she now supports both of her parents as individuals rather than as a couple. “But now that my mom is so in love with my stepdad, who I completely adore, and now that my dad, I see him finding happiness, too — I can love them both as individuals instead of as a parental pairing.”
The Cyrus family’s private challenges have often played out in public, but Miley says she has learned to take it in stride. “The thing I like about the new way that the world works is that everything is so fast. In the ’90s, when something happened in a tabloid, remember how it would happen for a year? Now it’s just gone.”
Reflecting on her life in the spotlight, she added, “I’ve gotten so used to it that I’m like, ‘If this is the symptom that sometimes we deal with these embarrassing or difficult public opinions, then that’s something I’m willing to take to have the life that we have.'”
