Jennifer Lopez on What She's Learned at Home With Her Kids
J Lo Says Staying Home Means Dinner With the Twins Every Night For the First Time "Probably Ever"
Being at home for the better part of this year has been a "real eye-opener" for Jennifer Lopez, who normally has her very talented hands in a bunch of things at once. It wasn't until her go-go-go lifestyle came to a grinding halt that she realised just how busy she was and what that meant for her family, especially her two kids, 12-year-old twins Max and Emme. In an interview with WSJ. Magazine, J Lo — the outlet's 2020 Pop Culture Innovator — shared what she's learned during her time at home with her family, which also includes her fiancé Alex Rodriguez, and his two daughters, Natasha and Ella.
The interview first moves into the topic of being at home with her kids when in the middle of the Zoom interview, Max walked in with one of his devices making noise and J Lo had to ask him to turn it down, proving that even pop superstars struggle with getting a handle on screen time. "The twins are 12 now. It's crazy," she said. "I've got to get them off those electronics for the rest of the day. I let them have them in the morning on the weekends but then I've gotta snatch 'em."
As evidenced from Instagram, the Lopez-Rodriguez crew has also been spending a lot of time outside together — playing volleyball or hosting backyard baseball spring training — and also, for the first time "in probably ever," J Lo has been able to have dinner with her kids every night.
"You thought you were doing OK, but you're rushing around and you're working and they're going to school and we're all on our devices. We're providing this awesome life for them, but at the same time, they need us."
"I actually loved being home and having dinner with the kids every night, which I hadn't done in probably—ever," Jennifer shared, adding that this family time has given her kids the chance to open up about what their lives usually look like. "And the kids kind of expressed to me, like, the parts that they were fine with about our lives and the parts they weren't fine with. It was just a real eye-opener and a reassessment, to really take a look at what was working and what wasn't working. You thought you were doing OK, but you're rushing around and you're working and they're going to school and we're all on our devices. We're providing this awesome life for them, but at the same time, they need us. They need us in a different way. We have to slow down and we have to connect more."
This process of slowing down has also made her consider how much of her kids' lives she could miss when not at home with them. "I realised, 'God. I would have missed that if I wasn't here today,'" Jennifer said.
She added, of her kids' maturity and growth during this period: "I feel like everybody aged, like, three years during this pandemic. I watched them go from kind of young and naive to really, like, grown-ups to me now. When did this happen? They're not our babies anymore. They've been given a dose of the real world, with the knowledge that things can be taken away from you and life is going to happen no matter what. They had to grow up. So did we."
