Jamie Lynn Spears needed to make some hard decisions about her life when she found out she was pregnant at 15.
“I moved to Mississippi in the middle of nowhere,” Spears, 32, said during the Wednesday, July 26, episode of Hannah Brown’s “Better Tomorrow” podcast, which was recorded before the SAG-AFTRA strike. “I didn’t have a cell phone, I had a house phone. I was like, ‘No one call me,’ [and] I put myself on a budget.”
The Sweet Magnolias star continued: “I had a budget for, like, 10 years that I lived very strictly by and I just wanted to be normal and I just really wanted to be away [from the spotlight].”
Spears, the younger sister of pop star Britney Spears, found out in 2007 that she was pregnant with her first baby when she was still a teenager. Jamie Lynn and ex-boyfriend Casey Aldridge welcomed their daughter, Maddie, in June 2008. The Zoey 101 alum told Brown, 28, that she enjoyed the mundane daily activities of parenting without all eyes watching her.
“I think being in a small town and going into a store [where the cashier] who’s checking you out doesn’t care about who you are, what you’re doing or who’s taking your picture, she’s trying to get home to her kids,” Jamie Lynn said. “Interacting with people like that on a daily basis makes you have a much different outlook whenever a newspaper writes a bad headline about you that’s not true. Like, you know what, that doesn’t matter. These are the people that matter.”
Maddie is now 15, which is the same age that Jamie Lynn was when she learned she was pregnant for the first time.
“That was something I took responsibility for the way that made sense for me,” Jamie Lynn explained. “That doesn’t make sense to everyone else, but it made sense for me and the whole world came down and told me I was the worst human alive for doing so and that every young girl who ever watched my show was going to be ruined because of me and my personal responsibility.”
Jamie Lynn now looks at Maddie — and her 5-year-old daughter, Ivey, whom she shares with husband Jamie Watson — and tries to shield them from what she went through.
“I look at both my children [and think] at least at that age I was in the business because I did it and I loved it. I was putting myself out there, but my children truly are not,” Jamie Lynn — who rose to fame for her roles on All That, Crossroads and Zoey 101 — noted during the Wednesday podcast episode. “That is what their mom does, so anytime that I feel I’ve exposed them in any way, you feel tremendous guilt. I try to protect them in every way that I can, but I also try to defend them in every way I can.”
