All about Adam Brody and Leighton Meester’s two children

Leighton Meester’s children are her top priority.

“There’s a lot of things I didn’t do that I wanted to be with them,” Meester told Bustle in May 2025. “I don’t like being away from them. I think a lot of people feel that way, but I don’t particularly like it.”

Meester and fellow actor Adam Brody appeared together on Season 2 of the Netflix series Nobody Wants This and married in 2014. The two have a daughter, Arlo, who was born in 2015, and a son, whose name has not been disclosed, who was born in 2020.

Meester and Brody have publicly shared some anecdotes about their daughter and son, but for the most part they tend to keep their children out of the spotlight.

Here’s everything Leighton Meester and Adam Brody shared about their two children.

Meester and Brody secretly gave birth to their first child in 2015

Meester and Brody’s daughter, Arlo Day Brody, was born on August 4, 2015 in Whittier, California. At the time, the couple did not comment on Meester’s pregnancy or the birth of their baby, which came as no surprise to fans since they also kept their 2014 wedding private.

However, the Country Strong actress seemed to hint at her and Brody’s future as parents when speaking to Nylon in late 2014.

“Most people I know are starting to get married. Children will be next,” the former Gossip Girl star told the magazine. “I like adult things. I like owning a house. I have a dog.”

Meester says motherhood is ‘the hardest job in the world’

Although the couple has kept their family private and hasn’t shared any photos of their daughter, Meester has opened up about becoming a mother.

“I feel really lucky, but still, I was able to step into the hardest job in the world, which is being a mother,” the actress told Shape in March 2019.

She later added: “One of the things I’ve learned as a parent is that you have to step back and allow your child to struggle a little bit and let them fall on the playground. That’s how children learn.”

Arlo is happy to share his thoughts about his parents’ work

In May 2020, Meester shared her daughter’s strong opinions about her and Brody’s collaboration on the ABC series Single Parents.

“Our daughter said, ‘You’ve been working for a long time.’ It’s like we’ve been here all day,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “She said, ‘We can’t both work at the same time.’

Meester’s own childhood influenced her parenting

Meester also opened up about how her own struggles with poverty as a child influenced the way she raised her daughter.

“We live in such a bubble,” she told E! News for August 2023. “And we’re obviously really happy and grateful to be able to give her everything that we didn’t have as kids. But we also want her to understand that not everyone grows up like that.”

The Single Parents actress said she plans to take Arlo with her on upcoming volunteer work with hunger-relief nonprofit Feeding America.

“I think the important thing is to lead by example,” she said. “When we sit around the table, we always talk about what we’re grateful for and what we enjoyed the most that day, and we just appreciate the food.”

she continued. “So she knows in a childish way that people grow in different ways. So I hope she can embrace that, but it’s best to just be grateful for everything that you have.”

Meester and Brody welcomed their second child in 2020.

Brody confirmed that he and Meester welcomed their second child, a boy, in October 2020. In March of that year, news broke that Meester was pregnant, and her baby’s forehead was photographed at the time.

After the birth of his son, Brody opened up about becoming a parent of two in an interview with PEOPLE. “It was so magical,” he said. “These are very crazy times for everyone, but we’re very, very lucky to have some security and flexibility in the work that we do. We talk about it all the time, but we’re just ridiculously lucky and fortunate.”

The actor also said that being isolated during Meester’s pregnancy had some “benefits” for the couple. “You are now in a cocoon. The outside world is scary for now, but at the same time full of thrills and hope,” he explained.

“For us, fortunately, at this time in our lives, at this moment in our lives, there are definitely magical moments in this family growing one by one, and it certainly has been a benefit,” Brody continued.

Arlo loves being a big sister

While speaking with People, the OC alum shared that she is “very excited” and “so happy” that Arlo will be an older sibling. Their son’s arrival also had the added bonus of giving Brody and Arlo extra time to bond.

“My wife has definitely been busier than usual over the last six months, and I’ve even been able to spend some extra time with[Arlo],” he tells PEOPLE. “It was magical and I’ll never forget it.”

He said this in an interview with WSJ. Magazine a few months later, the actor detailed how he and his daughter were spending quality time during the pandemic.

“Go Fish has been popular for a while. We stepped it up to Monopoly Junior, a little bit of piano and a little bit of karaoke,” he explained. “[Our daughter]expressed her desire to be able to ride a bike without training wheels, and when that became a reality, she kind of backed away. Then we went for a lot of walks around the neighborhood.”

Ms. Meester has a hard time being separated from her children while working.

Two years after her son was born, Meester told Entertainment Tonight that being away from her children “doesn’t seem to get any better.”

“I kept thinking maybe it would happen, but it didn’t,” she said. “And now I’m really doubling down on this kid thing. So it’s kind of a double whammy, like, ‘Well, now I have a baby, and he needs me.’ ”

She went on to say, “Working is the ultimate guilty pleasure, because I want to be here and I’m having fun. Of course, I think that’s all good, but in this world, in our society, in everything, it doesn’t give us a lot of room to feel complete in either position and be satisfied with going to work, being away from our kids, or being with our kids. We can’t do that either.”

Meester said filming the film “Weekend Away” in Croatia was particularly difficult when her son was a baby.

“I was with the baby and I couldn’t separate him because he’s a baby. We couldn’t separate each other,” she recalled. “It was hard to be away from him most of the day. There’s never an easy way to do it.”

Being a mother helps Meester relate to her character.

Meester was able to apply her experience as a mother to her acting roles. In March 2022, she told Cosmopolitan UK that she was in a relationship with her character Beth from the Netflix thriller A Weekend Away.

“I was really excited to play a new mom going on her first weekend. When you have a baby, it’s the most exciting thing and also the most terrifying thing, especially when it’s your first baby,” she told the magazine.

Meester describes motherhood as an “emotional journey”

Meester also said that her journey to raise her children “gave me an opportunity to reflect on my own upbringing and childhood.”

“It’s all very intimate and private,” she told PEOPLE in August 2023. “It was something that I could never describe in words. Having a child is a very emotional journey and it certainly caused me to reflect on my own upbringing and childhood.”

She continued, “Now that we have kids, we want to give them everything we didn’t have when we were kids, but we also want to be frank and open about how grateful we should be for everything we have.”