Sarah Michelle Gellar Compares Letting Her Kids on Social Media to Letting Them Get Face Tattoos
There are no hard and fast rules as to when a kid is ready to have their own social media accounts, but Sarah Michelle Gellar would rather play it safe than sorry. The Do Revenge star and her husband Freddie Prinze Jr. share 13-year-old Charlotte and 10-year-old Rocky, and Gellar doesn’t plan on letting them get on any social media any time soon.
“Our rules are probably stricter than most. Our kids don’t have social media,” Gellar explained while talking to Yahoo Life. “They’re allowed to look sometimes when it’s our phones. Sometimes, our kids will be like ‘you guys are the strictest household!’ But I say, ‘yes, but everyone still wants to come here!'”
Gellar took some time to slay misconceptions about social media for her kids, and equated posting as a kid to getting a face tattoo of a character from Paw Patrol as a 5-year-old, only to be completely embarrassed about said face ink a few years later.
“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 said. “That’s a very hard concept for young kids to grasp.” Yes, the internet is ephemeral, but Gellar knows that simply deleting a post doesn’t mean it’s gone forever — and she wants to keep her kids from posting something that they would later regret.
Luckily for Gellar, her kids aren’t too bent out of shape about not being online. “My son doesn’t care [about social media]. My daughter is definitely curious, but we’ve explained that these are our rules and different families have different rules,” she separately explained to Us Weekly. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer star knows that she will have to “cross that bridge,” one day, noting that she will require Charlotte to have a public account “because you have to be held accountable.”
Of course, Gellar and Prinze Jr., aren’t the strictest parents in the world by any stretch. As Gellar puts it, “We’re not mean, we’re not unnecessarily strict, but we have rules. And the same way I abide by my code of rules, I expect the same from our children.”
Another one of Gellar and Prinze Jr.’s parenting rules? Keeping the kids off their social feeds as well. “A lot of people are willing to put their kids on social media. A lot of people are willing to put their kids out there,” Prinze Jr told Us in 2021. “That’s just not something that I’ve ever done.”
Navigating social media as an adult is difficult, let alone as a kid. While parents have every right to let their children use social media when they feel the time is right (and they are at least 13, the minimum age for many social media platforms). Looks like Gellar is on the right track keeping her kids safe and teaching them about the potentially very real repercussions of posting anything online.
Before you go, check out the best screen-free toys for kids.