There is no spoiling in this household! Celebrity supermom Jennifer Garner told Us Weekly on Monday, May 18, that she and Ben Affleck try to raise their little ones — Violet, 9, Seraphina, 6, and Samuel, 3 — "like real kids."
"We’re so involved," Garner, 42, told Us at the launch of her new kids' crafts line We Made It in Santa Monica, Calif. "I just took a year and a half off of work and I’ve been home. You treat them like real kids. They have boundaries and they have rules and they throw fits."
In fact, they're daily occurrences. "Yesterday, we were at a bike store getting their bikes serviced and getting new helmets that fit and… my littlest one [Samuel] saw something he wanted. I had just said, 'We’re not buying anything,' and he threw a fit," she recalled. "The people at the store said to me, 'Please let us just give this to you' because he was so unhappy. And I said, 'I’m sorry that he’s throwing a fit in your store and you’re so sweet to want to give this to him. And thank you for asking me first. But he’s going to have to throw a fit.' I said no. No is no."
Leave it to Violet and Seraphina to know about the no. "I said to my girls, 'What do I mean when I say no?'" Garner told Us. "And they were like, 'She really means no!' So you just have to do it. It’s not pretty. I don’t think that I’m always the best at it but I try my best to be consistent and for them to know what they can expect from me."
That consistency filters down to their lunches! "If I leave town for work, I always leave them a note for their lunch for every day that I’m gone," Garner told Us. "I was just gone last week. I’m shooting a movie in Montreal and I was gone for three days and I came home and the kids were like, 'This week’s lunch notes were really great mom!'"
When she's around, they do normal things like crafts. "We do a lot of crafting at our house," Garner told Us. "I don’t even know how it got started because if you ask me, 'Are you crafty?' I would say, 'No…' but it's something that we just do."
Each child has his or her own style. "I have one kid who loves to play pretend all the time," Garner told Us. "We had a cabinet that wasn’t being used, and I saw this in a magazine… [We] put pretty patterned paper in as wallpaper, and divided the rooms, and I got some dollhouse furniture. It’s her little tucked-away dollhouse. But it’s not in a dollhouse. It’s just a cabinet, and she loves it so much. Sometimes you can’t find her and she’s just hidden under this counter playing in her cabinet with all her people."
Samuel, meanwhile, is a messy little one. "He just loves anything with paint," Garner gushed, as she showed us a few pictures of their crafts together. "Today, we made the visor. We made the chef’s hat the other day, super cute, and then my oldest is ready to do things that are a little more complicated and we have things for that age, too. So with her, I’ve had a blast making this doll hoop thing. We’ve had a lot of fun making things for dolls."
The one aspect of their lives that is slightly extraordinary — which the kids know — is the fact that their dad is the next Batman. "We definitely have been drinking the Batman Kool-Aid at our house," Garner joked with Us. "Yeah, we have one in particular who is pretty excited."
In general, Garner credited her fellow Hollywood moms for keeping her grounded. "I’m so thrilled to get to raise my kids in the environment that they are in," she reflected Monday. "I think it’s easy just to imagine that all these kids are spoiled and entitled. Part of what makes me be strong with my kids is the fact that I’m surrounded by other really firm strong moms."
