Anna Good
Beloved Buffy Summers actress Sarah Michelle Gellar revealed that she and her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. have very strict rules about how much their children are allowed to see on social media.
In a recent interview with Yahoo Life’s So Mini Ways, Gellar said that 13-year-old Charlotte and 10-year-old Rocky aren’t allowed to have their own social media accounts, and are barely even allowed to look at social media with one of their parents looking on.
“Our rules are probably stricter than most. Our kids don’t have social media,” the actress said in the interview, adding that their children are “allowed to look sometimes” on her or her husband’s phones.
She went on to say, “Sometimes, our kids will be like, ‘You guys are the strictest household!’ But I say, ‘Yes, but everyone still wants to come here!'”
Part of these strict rules, Gellar shared, stem from an idea of what is healthy for children to see and experience. She equated the idea of children and young teens using social media to a five-year-old getting a Paw Patrol drawing permanently tattooed on their face.
“Because at that age, there’s nothing better than Paw Patrol. And now, you’re 10 and [13], and you still have these tattoos on your face, and it’s not even who you are anymore,” Gellar reasoned. “That’s a very hard concept for young kids to grasp. I believe kids need to know what their limitations are, and they actually thrive in that environment.”
While some parents and teens may view these rules about social media to be overbearing and authoritarian, Gellar says that she and her husband aren’t “mean” about the rules their family abides by.
“We’re not mean, we’re not unnecessarily strict, but we have rules,” the 45-year-old actress went on. “And the same way I abide by my code of rules, I expect the same from our children.”