Julie Bowen Opens Up About Parenting Her 3 Teenage Sons at Home: ‘They Start Coming in and Out’

Julie Bowen opened up about parenting her three teenage boys and the important lesson she learned about time.

“With teenagers, my sister told me this and it has been really helpful. ‘Cause I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’ I’m like sitting around, I should be going on dates or something. Should I be having an adult age?” Julie, 54, said during a Monday, October 14, appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Three Questions with Andy Richter.” “She goes, ‘At this age, they need you five percent of the time. And the other 95 percent they could give a rat’s [ass] if you’re around.’”

“But when they need you, you don’t know when it’s gonna be,” she continued. “Or where it’s gonna be. And you’re gonna miss that moment if you aren’t doing some lurking, I mean Yeah.”

Julie shares son Oliver and twins John and Gustave with her ex-husband, Scott Phillips. The Modern Family actress and the real estate investor were married from 2004 to 2018.

“Go do your job. Go have a life. Yeah. But there’s times like on Saturday night when I’m like, well, I don’t even know who’s, if they’re gonna be here, they’re going out,” the mom of three said about her kids. “I should go make plans. And yet if you just kind of park it, make fake cookies in the kitchen no one’s ever gonna eat. They start coming in and out.”

“You start having conversations with teenagers. You just sort of have to like — being around works,” Julie added. “But planning, trying to be like, you know, it would be fun if we had a super awkward meal at Chipotle together, where you never look up from that weird hair that’s in your face.”

Andy chimed in to say that Julie having awkward dinners with her kids is like “a job interview for a job you don’t want.”

Julie agreed, saying, “Yes, exactly. But you think ‘No, what would they like to do?’ And you’re like, nothing. They would like to do Nothing. So you just sort of have to, you’ve gotta sort of be there in order to catch the runoff and sometimes it’s freaking magic and great. So that’s my teenager advice.”

It wasn’t the first time she opened up about parenting in recent weeks. The Hysteria! actress appeared on Today on September 12 to talk about her new project as well as her life at home with her kids.

“They sleep all day; luckily they’ve all grown at different rates and different times [and] gone into that heavy sleep cycle,” she said of her sons.

“Right now because I’m working on the East Coast and they live in L.A., the only way I communicate with them is through Snapchat,” Julie told hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb during the appearance.

She had Hoda and Jenna cracking up when she brought up the fact that her kids all have rather unique haircuts. “They all have the stupid haircuts. Bless you, I love you, my children,” she said. “The haircuts are so dumb.”

New episodes of SiriusXM’s “The Three Questions with Andy Richter” are available every Tuesday on the SiriusXM app and wherever podcasts are available.