Why Jennifer Garner Says the Internet Is a 'Scary' Place
— -- In her latest movie, “Men, Women and Children,” Jennifer Garner plays an overprotective mom who obsessively monitors her daughter’s every keystroke, reading all her texts and even deleting objectionable ones.
“I think that my character is a mom who loves her daughter like crazy,” Garner told ABC News' Juju Chang in a sit-down interview for “Nightline.” “And how often as a mom have you had those moments where you think you’re just going to go that extra mile and you’re going to work that much harder and you’re going to protect your kid and at the end of the day you realize, ‘Oh, I actually made it harder for them.’”
Jennifer Garner on Her ‘Mindful’ Marriage to Ben Affleck
You’ll Never Guess What Jennifer Garner Does So Kids Don’t Forget Ben Affleck
And though her character goes to extremes to keep watch over her kid’s online movements, Garner, a real-life mother of three with husband Ben Affleck, who stars in the recently released movie “Gone Girl,” says “Men, Women and Children” made her “very aware” that the Internet can be a “scary” place.
The Internet is "something that I need to have on my radar and think about,” she said. “What’s going to happen the day one of my children Googles themselves? They’re going to be totally and completely shocked, so I want make sure I’m there for that.”
The movie takes on the issues of sexting, online pornography, online bullying and a host of other ways we communicate in this day and age. Garner even admitted she had to look up certain texting acronyms, including “DTF” and “POS.”
“I looked it all up. I know. It’s scary,” she said. “POS, ‘Parents over the shoulder,’ that freaks me out. ... I just think of my 8-year-old and my 5-year-old daughters and I just think, I can’t bear for that to be their reality because it wasn’t mine.”
And, Garner said, it’s not just her. Affleck too, she said, gives a lot of thought to his role as “daddy” to the couple’s three children, Violet, 8, Seraphina, 5, and Samuel, 2.
“My husband is very involved and definitely has an opinion and he is the yin to my yang as far as parenting is concerned,” she said.
But, Garner said, they might have different approaches as the kids get older.
“I’m sure his opinion will be, ‘look we need to let them screw up and explore and have these experiences and we need to be there to just catch them,’ whereas I might be a little more like, ‘nope, hold up, not yet, not yet,’” Garner said. “I’m the bad guy.”
Garner has been an outspoken advocate for paparazzi laws in California when it comes to taking photos of children, and though her kids are not at the age yet where they use the Internet regularly, Garner said she worries about how different their childhood might be from the one she had growing up.
“My world was really innocent and sweet and I had a real childhood that lasted for a long, long time,” she said.
