Mae Whitman on What Made Her Decide To Keep Her Son's Life off Social Media: 'I Feel Super Protective'
Mae Whitman announced her son’s birth with a low-key Instagram post in August 2024, days after Hailey and Justin Bieber made a similar announcement about their son, Jack. “Not to be a Bieber about it, but I too just gave birth to our son, Miles,” she wrote with her usual witty humor.
The 37-year-old actress disclosed her son’s name with a nod to his namesake, her Parenthood co-star Miles Heizer, but she didn’t reveal his face, nor did she confirm the identity of her son’s father, whom we now know is her longtime partner, Carlos Valdes.
In the year since, Whitman has maintained this level of privacy regarding her son. “I don’t want my baby to have anything to do with social media,” she tells SheKnows in an exclusive interview timed to the release of her Hallmark series, Twelve Dates Till Christmas. “I feel super protective, super private. I don’t want his face [online], I don’t want people really knowing anything about him because this is my private world.”
The actress sporadically shares photos with Valdes—Whitman’s Parenthood co-star Lauren Graham confirmed in March that he’s Miles’ dad—and occasionally shares shielded photos of her son with no identifying details. For the most part, though, she affords her son total privacy.
Whitman tells us that her own experience as a child star has pushed her to keep her son out of the public eye. “Coming from a world where I was a child actor,” she says, “I got by as a child actor as well as I did because my parents worked really, really hard to make sure I was safe in that environment even without social media.”
“I’m super aware of that, but I’m kind of going in the opposite direction where I’m like, ‘No, absolutely nothing posted.'”
Whitman says that she has never considered herself a social media personality and feels wary about overusing social media. “My whole brand has always sort of been like, ‘Here it is, take it or leave it,'” she says. “He doesn’t have that choice, and I’m so reticent about social media in general, when it comes to kids and teens.”
That said, she’s still willing to be open about life as a mom, especially in a recent post dedicated to the crew she worked with for Twelve Dates ‘Till Christmas. “He’s the biggest part of my life,” she says, “And I like to be able to share the ways in which the crew was able to be such a family to him, and made my experience of being a mom so much more powerful and special and doable.”
In a previous conversation with SheKnows, Whitman said that moving to Ireland with a then-4-month-old baby to film the show felt “traumatic” initially. “I was really afraid, and coming from this such a raw and vulnerable place, it’s scary,” she explained, before crediting the cast and crew with making the experience joyful. “I was coming from the bottom layers of my psyche, but I rose to the top, all the way to the top, to the point where I felt so strong and so connected and so loved.”