Julia Roberts’ easy hack for parenting phone-obsessed teens

It seems like if anyone has their act together raising three teens, it would be the perpetually nonplussed Julia Roberts. But as it turns out, her kids, including 19-year-old twins and a 16-year-old, are just as likely to get sucked into scrolling and distracted by their devices like any other teens. So she turns to a tried-and-true hack to ensure quality family time in a tech-centric age.

In a Dec. 4 TODAY interview with Mahershala Ali, co-star in her upcoming movie called Leave the World Behind, Julia says, “So, for us, we just had sort of simple rules where we had a charging station, where everybody’s phone goes when you get home.” She adds there were “certainly” no phones at the table during meals. 

She adds that she has immense respect for her older children who have allowed her to be the “same mom” to them now as they always have, without a lot of the typical eye rolling, teen angst and other shenanigans toddler moms everywhere dread about the teen years to come. 

“There are no words for the joy, the fun, the wild rumpus of life together,” she posted on Instagram when her oldest two babies turned 19 a week ago. She sits in a Polaroid-style shot with those twin babies on the floor, looking as glamorous in new mom life as she usually does. At 56, life looks a lot different from those early days, she explains, being in another time zone with each kid “somewhere”. 

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Her new movie is a “multilayered disaster thriller” that Roberts reported gave her a chance to play someone quite different from herself. She says, “Just the idea of playing someone who’s sort of intrinsically suspicious and a little prickly, which is not my nature, but to still make her human and approachable and likable.” We can all watch the mom handling adult children behind the scenes and showing off her stellar acting on set on Dec. 8 when Netflix releases the movie.