Joey Lawrence may be a successful actor and podcast host, but at the end of the day, he’s a father above all else.
And like many parents these days, he’s petrified of the unknown when it comes to social media and drugs.
“I think this is the first time in history that things are significantly different from what they were when we were growing up,” says the former Flower star, who also recently starred in a new commercial for VinFast’s line of electric cars.
“In the 80s and 90s, you had your answering machine, your Walkman, which was a little different from your parents. But now you have social media, the Internet, and that’s changed everything,” he adds. “It made the world smaller. Now you have the whole world to worry about.”
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Lawrence, 47, who is on Instagram, says he’s not really a fan of social media at all, especially when it comes to his teenage daughters Liberty, 13, and Charleston, 17, with ex Chandie Yawn-Nelson. (He and his wife, Samantha Cope, welcomed a daughter, Dylan Rose, in January.)
“Everyone has a platform and you can bully up close or from afar,” he says. “It’s very difficult to navigate as a young person through these times. Everyone wants to be celebrated. Fame seems available to everyone. And they represent this life that doesn’t really exist.”
As someone who has spent decades in the spotlight, Lawrence knows firsthand how damaging it can be to one’s mental health.
So when it comes to his girlfriends, he is as loud as possible.
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“All these insecurities and everything that young people go through as they develop? I just try to give them perspective every chance I get to talk to them about it. I don’t mind being a helicopter parent, as embarrassing as it is,” he says. “You have to be really consistent and beat that consistent drum and hope that most of what you say is somehow absorbed into their brains.”
Besides worrying about social media and peer pressure, Lawrence is particularly petrified of fentanyl.
“You see horror stories every day,” he says of the deadly synthetic opioid. (Over the past two decades, more than 5,000 children and teenagers have died from fentanyl overdoses, according to data published earlier this year in JAMA Pediatrics.)
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“These kids are buying their weed on Snapchat, and it can be mixed with fentanyl. Really crazy things are happening. I tell my teenage daughter, she’s going to all these proms and she’s getting ready for college, I tell her I can’t [take anything]. I don’t care if they say it’s from a dealer, you just can’t do it because they put fentanyl in things on purpose β you eat gummy bear and you’re dead.”
He adds: “You used to be able to control it. You knew who the bad kids were at school, the ones to watch out for in the neighborhood.”
He knows that social media has changed that. “That’s the world they live in, though,” he says.
“You don’t want them living in a pond because they’re going to end up being exposed to this, and if they don’t know about [the bad stuff] or they’re not knowledgeable about it, they could become victims,” ββhe says. “So there’s a balance. It really is the Wild West out there. I feel like we’re in this very salty period of parenting that, in my personal opinion, has created a lot of turmoil.”
So does it make him long for the simpler days of Nintendo, video stores and lighthearted family comedies like Flower?
“Going to Blockbuster and picking up the latest releases to watch over the weekend?” he says. – It was a golden age!
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Source: HIS Education