Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have five kids between them, four of which are teens
Jennifer Lopez/Instagram, Kevin Winter/Getty
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are doing their best with a house full of teenagers.
During an appearance on Live with Kelly and Mark on Friday, the Mother actress, 53, opened up about parenting teens with her husband.
In addition to her twins, 15-year-old twins Maximilian “Max” David and Emme Maribel, who she shares with ex-husband Marc Anthony, Affleck is also dad to son Samuel, 11, and Seraphina, 14, Violet, 17, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner.
“It’s almost five teenagers!” Lopez told the hosts. “The younger is 11, so he’s not quite, but pre-teen!”
When Ripa teased those years were “worse than teens,” Lopez insisted, “he’s an angel.”
“But the teenage years are tough,” she conceded. “It’s challenging. You have this baby for a while and then it’s like, your best little friend who loves being with you all the time, and then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Get out of my room.'”
Lopez continued, “It’s a time when they are individuation, and they are challenging everything you say and everything you do and everything you are, and that’s what it is. And you have to kind of just ride the waves.”
Ripa joked that she’d sometimes hide from her teens in the closet, to which Lopez joked, “I understand more than you know!”
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“I think it’s particularly hard on moms, because they always love dad, they’re always like, ‘Dad’s the best!’ — and I was like that with my dad too!” she shared, turning to mom Guadalupe Rodríguez, who joined her on the show. “And my mom told me, and I’ll say it to you right now, on TV in front of everybody. I understand you so much more now.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Lopez commented on her and her mom’s different parenting styles.
“I’m just a little bit looser. I think my mom, for a long time, was a stay-at-home mom, and I’ve always been a working mom, so that right there is a very different thing,’ she continued. “And also she was 20 years old — by the time she was 26, she had 3 kids.”
“So she was kind of a kid raising kids. And I had my kids when I was 38, so I had them much later, so I was more of an adult at that time,” said Lopez. “We kind of grew up together.”
