Moderation is the key to parenting forKatherine Heigl.
The actress — who joinsSuitsas a series regular for itsupcoming eighth season— chatted with PEOPLE for this week’s issue about her new gig, plus dished a bit on some rules she and husbandJosh Kelleythink are important when it comes to their three children:Joshua Bishop, 18 months,Adalaide Marie Hope, 6, andNaleigh Mi-Eun, 9½.
“The girls are really into iPads. It’s not good. I need to curtail it, though I have to say, so much of that use is reading,” says Heigl, 39. “They’re reading,they’re playing educational games. I don’t allow them to scroll through YouTube videos and stuff; I put some limits on that.”
“But it’s not as mind-numbing as we all are afraid it is,” she adds of screen time.
Katherine Heigl/Instagram
One recent incident put the situation in perspective, as Heigl’s daughters and teenage niece Madison were sitting around the living room, engrossed in their devices.
“I was like, ‘None of us areconnecting or communicating,'” she recalls. “And then I went, ‘Oh, wait a minute — Naleigh and Madison are playing Words With Friends against each other, so essentially they’re playingScrabble, just without the board on the table. Adalaide is coloring on her iPad, Josh is reading the news and I’m reading a book.”
“We’re all doing things that we would be doing to entertain ourselves, we’re just doing them differently than we did them 20 years ago,” the27 Dressesstar points out. “It’s okay. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it, I promise.”
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Heigl tells PEOPLE shedoesn’t allow devices atthe dinner table (“because we do need to talk to one another, too, and make eye contact”), encourages trips to a local bookstore the family loves and requires the girls to charge their devices outside their rooms at night.
“I don’t allow them in the bedrooms, like, ‘Charge them at night where I can see them,'” she says, joking, “Maybe I should have that rulefor my husband.”
Suitsseason 8 premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on USA Network.
For more from Katherine Heigl, pick up the latest issue ofPEOPLE, on newsstands now.
source: people.com
