Jennifer Lopez’s kids, Max and Emme, were born in 2008. Their mother’s level of celebrity is all they’ve known, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t sometimes hard on them. Lopez said that the attention she gets every time she steps out of the house is not always something her children want. She spoke of a time when her kids asked her to stay home to avoid drumming up too much attention.

Jennifer Lopez said it stung when her kids asked her not to accompany them out

For years, Lopez has been a near-constant subject of media scrutiny. She’s a big enough star that practically every outing is an event. She said that her children sometimes want to avoid this level of attention.

“The other day, one of my kids said, ‘I want to go to the flea market,’” she told Vogue in 2022. “I was like, ‘Oh, you want me and Ben [Affleck] to come?’ They said, ‘You know, it’s such a thing when you go, Mom.’ It hurt my feelings.”

Jennifer Lopez | Bellocqimages/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images

She said she tried not to let it impact her too much, though. She could completely understand why they might feel that way.

“I get it,” she said. “They want time with their friends when they aren’t being watched and followed and photographed. It’s a thing. Nobody’s complaining, but it’s a thing.”

Recently, though, Lopez and her daughter Emme were spotted at a Los Angeles flea market (via Page Six).

Jennifer Lopez spoke about how she wants to raise her kids

Lopez said that as a parent, one of her main concerns is that her children grow up to be good people.

“I’ll stress to them, like, I want you to do well in school and then my son always finishes the sentence,” she said. “He goes, ‘But you care more that we’re good people.’ I say, ‘That’s right. I do.’”

She tries to teach them to do this, but she said her children teach her just as much.

“The beauty of being a parent is that you think you’re going to teach them all these things, and you do. You pass on all the things that you know, all the knowledge you have,” she said. “But at the end of the day they wind up teaching you so much and reminding you of the things you need to know about life and how to love somebody and how to care for people, that in your 20s and 30s, as you’re doing your own thing, you can lose sight of. We get so self-centered at certain points in our lives when we have our goals and our things.”

Her family grew when she married Ben Affleck in 2022

After Lopez and Ben Affleck married in 2022, her family of three became a family of seven. Affleck has three children from his marriage to Jennifer Garner. Lopez said she and Affleck have worked hard to smoothly bring their families together.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez | Michael Tran/AFP via Getty Images

“The transition is a process that needs to be handled with so much care,” she said. “They have so many feelings. They’re teens. But it’s going really well so far. What I hope to cultivate with our family is that his kids have a new ally in me and my kids have a new ally in him, someone who really loves and cares about them but can have a different perspective and help me see things that I can’t see with my kids because I’m so emotionally tied up.”