Jessica Alba is a pretty awesome mom to Us — but not so much to her kids.
“My kids do not think I’m cool,” Alba, 43, exclusively told Us Weekly while chatting about season 2 of her and Lizzy Mathis’ series Honest Renovations. Joking that she and Mathis, 41, are “the best of the worst” in their kids’ eyes, she added: “My kids just don’t think parents in general are cool because they’re, like, ‘Oh, what do they know?’ Cause obviously [they know].”
Mathis, for her part, thinks otherwise. “I think your kids think I’m cool,” she stated, to which Alba agreed. “Yeah, that’s true. They do,” she told Us. “My kids think my friends are cool, and they think Lizzy’s very cool.” (Alba shares three kids — Honor, 16, Haven, 13, and Hayes, 6 — with her husband, Cash Warren.)
Mathis — who shares three kids with her husband, Isa Rahman — noted that she shares the same sentiment about Alba’s children as they do about her. “I love kiki-ing with her kids. They are the best to kiki with,” she gushed. “I will sit down with Honor and Haven all day, and I’ll be, like, ‘Girl, tell me everything.’”
One thing that earned Alba some cool points was allowing daughters Honor and Haven to borrow some of her 2000s archival looks for the June premiere of her film Trigger Warning. Honor sported a green-and-black checkered Prada dress that her mother wore to the 2007 premiere of Valentine’s Day, while Haven donned a denim Dolce and Gabanna dress that Alba wore to Comic-Con in 2010.
“I saved some of my dresses over the years. It was cool that they got to use it for my premiere,” Alba said of the clothing swap. “I mean, they’re not using vintage dresses all the time, but this was a special occasion and I actually suggested it and I thought they were going to be like, ‘No.’ But they both were like, ‘Yeah, that’s cute.’ And I was like, ‘OK!’”
Before teaming up for their show Honest Renovations, Alba and Mathis met through their kids. “It’s really cool having a very close best friend who has kids that are older than me because she’s crossing all these boundaries and thresholds before me,” Mathis shared. “And it’s awesome to be able to call her and be like, ‘So, what do we do in this situation? What’s our game plan here?’ Because it’s stuff that she’s already experienced.”
Alba noted that it’s been nice to have Mathis by her side as her kids go through their teenage years, stating, “We’re going into colleges and that stuff and it just feels so adult. It feels so grown. And I’m like, ‘But you’re still my baby.’ It’s weird.”
Alba and Mathis use their motherhood experience to help other parents create kid-friendly homes on season 2 of Honest Renovations, which premiered on August 23. The duo help clients identify household issues and create solutions, with a goal to elevate homes while making them more functional by identifying key issues for the family, finding problem-solving design solutions and making them a reality.
“I think it’s always a bit of a shock, that new parent thing, ‘cause you are really living your adult life and you can leave a pet at home alone and they’re going to be OK. You cannot leave a child at home alone,” Alba said of parenting challenges. “I think just that switch that happens where you’re not sleeping through the night and you are responsible for the health and wellbeing of a whole human being, it’s a lot. And so, I think that first kid transition is always the hardest.”
For Mathis, she said the hardest stage of parenting was the transition from babies to toddlers. “Once they start becoming toddler and kindergarten and they start creating all these school projects and things come home and all this and toys, then I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Where can you put all these things?’” she quipped. “I think that was the hardest part for me. I was like, ‘Where is the space outside of my space to put their stuff?’”
Season 2 of Honest Renovations is now streaming on The Roku Channel.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
