Joanna Gaines Uses This Parenting App to 'Stalk' Her Teenagers: 'All Four Are Driving!'(Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Chip and Joanna Gaines and a throwback photo of their four oldest kids.Photo:Cindy Ord/Getty; Chip Gaines/Instagram

Cindy Ord/Getty; Chip Gaines/Instagram

Joanna Gainesknows all too well what every parent around the world knows: When the kids start driving, it’s a whole new host of worries.

“All four of my older kids are driving now,” Gaines, 46, told PEOPLE, of kids Drake, 19, Ella, 18, Duke, 16, and Emmie, 15 whom she shares with her husbandChip.

Like most parents around the country, she keeps track of them through technology.

“I stalk them on the app Life360!” she says with a laugh. “It tells you how fast they’re going.”

Gaines says watching her oldest kids turn into young adults has been difficult in many ways —  but there have also been plenty of silver linings.

“I was so sad when Duke went to college,” she says.

“But they’re just turning into these wonderful human beings. My favorite thing is seeing them hanging out in a restaurant together as friends. Because when they were younger I was always monitoring their fights, and now they’re dear friends, which is so cool.”

She says she’s also much more conscious that they’re going to be “exiting” soon.

“Knowing that [the older kids] will be gone in the next few years, I’ve made a conscious decision to create micro-moments, to feel in the now with our family, just be really more intentional with our time together,” she says. “And hopefully, try and slow it all down a bit!”

Her second oldest, Ella, will be the next to start college in the fall. “I feel like it all went so fast,” she says, adding that she’s relishing in having her six-year-old son Crew around now.

“Crew makes me feel younger, and really anchors me,” she says. “It’s been such a gift.”

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Crew was also the inspiration behind her newest children’s bookThe World Needs the Wonder You See(out now).

“I just love watching him and how he moves throughout his day,” she says of her nature-loving boy.

“He’s always looking out the window, the first to notice something. A lot of us have that when we’re younger, but then I feel like we stop expecting wonder, because we’re so busy. And he’s just inspired me to live like he does.”

source: people.com