Parents worry about their children all the time. Two items of concern on many parents' worry lists are the negative impacts of social media and drugs. Joey Lawrence believes that it has made him a helicopter parent.
Joey, best known as a teen heartthrob of the 1980s, is now 47 years old and a father of three. He shares daughters Liberty, 13, and Charleston, 17, with ex Chandie Yawn-Nelson. In January 2023, his wife Samantha Cope gave birth to their daughter Dylan Rose.
"I think it's the first time in history where things are fundamentally different to the way they were when we were growing up," the former Melissa & Joey star mused. "In the '80s and '90s you had your answering machine, your Walkman, which was a little different to your parents. But now you have social media, the internet, and it's changed everything.”
These changes scare Joey, who isn’t a big fan of social media. "That made the world smaller. It's the whole world you have to worry about now,” he stated.
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Joey worries about how social media can distort reality. "Everybody's got a platform and you can bully from near or far," he explained. "It's very tough to navigate as a young person through these times. Everyone wants to be glorified. Fame feels accessible to everybody. And they're presenting this life that doesn't really exist."
Joey knows all too well the pressures of having a public-facing life. He isn’t afraid to tell his girls about it. "All these insecurities and everything that young people go through as they're developing? I just try to give them perspective every chance I get to talk them through it,” he stated.
Joey wants to make sure the message gets through loud and clear. “I don't mind being a helicopter parent, as annoying as that is," he explained. "You have to be really consistent and beat that consistent drum and hope that most of what you say somehow gets absorbed into their brains."
Another thing Joey worries about is drugs, specifically fentanyl. "You see horror stories every day," he said. "These kids are buying their weed over Snapchat and it can be laced with fentanyl. There's really crazy stuff going on.”
“I tell my teenage daughter, she's going to all these senior parties and is getting ready to go to college, I tell her you can't [take anything],” he went on to say. “I don't care if they say it's from a dealer, you just can't do it because they're lacing things with fentanyl on purpose — you eat a gummy bear and then you're dead."
Joey wants his kids to be aware of the dangers of the world. "You don't want them to live in a fishbowl because they're eventually going to be exposed to this, and if they don't know about [the bad stuff] or aren't savvy about it, they could be subject to being victims," he says. "So there is a balance.”
Sometimes, Joey longs for the old days. "Going to Blockbuster and scooping up the latest releases to watch over the weekend?" he mused. "It was the golden age!"
