“Are you kidding!!??? Um… ALL THE YES!!!”
Katherine Heigl’s kids weren’t too fond of her new rules — but they eventually came around.
The 46-year-old actress, best known for her role as Dr. Izzie Stevens on “Grey's Anatomy,” shares three children — Naleigh, 15, Adalaide, 13, and Joshua, 8 — with her husband Josh Kelley.
In a new interview with People, published July 5, Heigl revealed that all three of her kids have phones.
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"I was going to try to wait until 16, and I realized it's not possible,” Heigl said of her eldest daughter, who received her first phone when she was 12.
She later revealed that Adalaide got her first phone at “nine or 10,” while Joshua “has had a phone since he was like three.”
According to Stanford Medicine, the average age at which a child receives their first phone is 11.6 years old.
“It’s ridiculous,” Heigl said before admitting that her kids became “little addicts” with their phones.
A study conducted by the University of Albany found that “87 percent of children had screen time exceeding recommendations from the American Pediatric Academy.”
“Our results suggest an important need to develop strategies for reducing children’s screen time at very young ages,” said Erin Bell, a professor at the university who co-led the study.
For Heigl, she knew she needed to lay some ground rules once her kids’ grades started slipping.
"We always said no phones at bedtime, but there was sneaking devices and staying up really late and not getting good sleep and being unbearably cranky the next day,” she explained.
When that didn’t work, Heigl and Kelley doubled down.
"They don't get their devices at all on Tuesday, Thursdays or Sundays,” she told People of their modified rules.
“Saturday they get it after lunch. And they would only get them Monday, Wednesday and Friday after school, after homework, until bedtime,” she added.
Heigl also revealed that her kids aren’t allowed to take their phones into their rooms at night and have to leave the phones in her room to charge.
Heigl’s strict rules have had a positive effect on her kids’ lives
While her strict parenting was initially met with “anger and boredom and frustration,” it didn’t take long for Heigl’s rules to yield a positive result.
"It was like withdrawal for the first couple of weeks,” she told People. “We just had to get through it. Josh and I would just give each other a pep talk, like, 'It's going to get better.'"
Over time, Heigl said her kids started to develop interests away from their phones.
“I felt so much relief," she continued. "Kids have not yet learned how to self regulate and self discipline, so we have to teach them."
Heigl and Kelley, a pop-turned-country singer, first met on the set of his “Only You” music video in 2005.
Kelley, whose brother is a member of Lady A, recalled his first moments with Heigl in a 2016 interview with Billboard.
“I remember the day we met: May 24, 2005,” he told the outlet. “I had just bought a house here in Nashville. The day after I signed the papers, I had to fly back to L.A. to do this music video.”
“I showed up that day, we started doing our scenes together, and we just hit it off. We’ve been together ever since that day,” he added.
The couple tied the knot in Park City, Utah, on Dec. 23, 2007, according to People.
They adopted their eldest daughter, Naleigh, from South Korea in 2009 before adopting their second daughter, Adalaide, from Louisiana in 2012.
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The pair welcomed their only son, Joshua, four years later on Dec. 20, 2016.
