13 November 2024
Melissa Joan Hart suffers from "mom guilt".
Melissa Joan Hart has turned down work so she can be at home with her children
The 48-year-old actress has Mason, 18, Braydon, 16, and 12-year-old Tucker with her husband Mark Wilkerson but has always "found it "heartbreaking" to leave her children behind so she could go to work and has even sometimes turned down opportunities so she could be at home.
She told FoxNewsDigital: 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.
"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? And making decisions about my career, and 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."
"It was really difficult. But you know that mom guilt is real."
'The Bad Guardian' star - who enjoyed massive success in the 1990s when she played the title roles in both 'Clarissa Explains It All' and 'Sabrina, the Teenage Witch' - believes that all parents feel the same way no matter what their job is.
She 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.
"But mom, guilt, I think, is real; parent guilt is real across the board, I think, no matter what you're doing. But I do try to look at the blessing of the fact that I get to be home, driving them to school [or] be there for their birthdays."
English (US) ·