How Melissa Joan Hart Prioritizes Family Over Fame
By Movieguide® Contributor
Actress Melissa Joan Hart explained how after she became a mainstay in the entertainment industry, she began turning down roles to spend time with her family.
In 2009, after constantly moving her family around for her acting roles, Hart and her husband decided they would look for a permanent community for their sons to grow up in. Hart knew this would limit her career to some degree, but she decided to prioritize her kids over herself.
They eventually decided on a home in Connecticut, though the actress would commute to L.A. if she needed to be there to shoot a show or movie.
“I immediately got pulled back out to L.A. to work on a TV show,” Hart told Fox News Digital. “And with a TV show like MELISSA AND JOEY, you don’t know if it’s gonna be a half a year, a whole year, five years. So you take it a year at a time and make your decisions as a family as you go. So for the first two years, I lived in California, and they were in Connecticut. They would come out and visit…we wouldn’t go more than two weeks without seeing each other, but that was really, really hard on me.”
Hart shares Mason, 18, Braydon, 16, and Tucker, 12, with husband Mark Wilkerson.
After Hart became pregnant with her third son, missing out on time with her family became too much, and they all moved out to L.A. so she wouldn’t have to miss them for months at a time.
“So it was all sort of, like, year by year, sort of: Where should we be? How are we gonna do this as a family?” she explained. “And making decisions about my career, balancing out with our family. And, you know, sometimes I turned down jobs just to stay at home and just so the kids could be at home, or sometimes I would leave for chunks of time, which was heartbreaking and really hard for me.”
Now that she is a mother to teenagers, Hart is so thankful she prioritized time with them over her career, though she still feels guilt for the moments she has missed.
READ MORE: Melissa Joan Hart Gets Real About Parenting Teens: ‘It’s A Loss Of Their Childhood’
“It was really difficult. But you know that mom guilt is real,” Hart said. “That’s the thing about my job; I get to be a full-time parent when I’m not working. Right now, I’m in West Virginia. I’m away from them for three weeks, but they know it’s [these] three weeks, and then the next three weeks we’re all together.”
“We’re going away together for Thanksgiving,” she added. “We’ll be together for Christmas, and we’re going to ski together. And so we do it in chunks.”
With her oldest going off to college soon, Hart has cherished all the time she has left with him at home. Recently she joined his football team in serving the victims of the hurricanes that ravaged the East Coast earlier this year.
“To do something like this, to be able to, you know, provide the resources to put together these hygiene kits and just, you know, knowing that they’re going to go help people that are unhoused or that are, you know, in an emergency situation fleeing…It makes it that they’re more willing to help, I think, when it’s like something that they can understand, you know?” she said.
“When they’re seeing the face of homelessness or when they’re packing something and seeing that this is all someone’s going to have is this little thing and toothpaste and this comb and shampoo…It really helps, I think, to motivate them when they understand who they’re helping,” Hart added.
READ MORE: FORMER CHILD STAR PUTS FAMILY FIRST — ALWAYS
Faith also plays a key role in Hart’s parenting.
“We pray constantly. We pray over every meal. We pray every bedtime. We pray on every journey,” Hart said. “We pray whenever someone in the family needs that; we pray for people that we know in the world that need it … We’re church-going Sunday people and we’re Bible study people and we really try to live a life based on what Jesus taught us.”
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