Jessica Alba is speaking out about the difficulties of being a parent.

On a recent episode of Dear Media’s Raising Good Humans podcast, the actress, 40, spoke about her experience raising both teenagers and a toddler, as well as one of the “hardest” aspects of parenting.

Allowing your children to make mistakes so they can learn from them is the most difficult part of being a parent for Alba. “That is the hardest part about being a parent is allowing your kids to make a mistake and knowing when it is going to be too hard or too much,” she told podcast host Dr Aliza. “And then you’re like, I guess nothing’s too much.”

However, the lifestyle guru realized that these blunders are vital since they will teach her children valuable lessons. “But I also like it,” she said. “They’re not mistakes, they’re lessons, and they’re meant to go through the challenges and it’s meant to bring them out the other side,” she said.

“So, yeah, that’s impossible,” she added. “That’s one thing that I definitely struggle with.”

Alba also talks about the developmental disparities between her three children, particularly her ten-year-old Haven Garner and her thirteen-year-old Honor Marie.

Honor’s “emotional needs, her intellectual needs” are different from Haven’s, she explains.

“You have sort of like the 10-year-old fifth-grader stuff, which is the beginning of the hormone shifts and the awakening of this next stage of self, and Honor’s like right in the thick of it,”she explains.

She explains, “They’re just at very different stages. And then the baby, he’s not a baby, he’s 4. He’s very cute and he just wants to play.”

Alba has recently opened up about being a parent on several occasions. She mentioned attending Honor’s therapy sessions last year.

“I felt like my relationship really suffered with my parents because they didn’t know how to communicate with me and how I needed to be parented,” she said on Katherine Schwarzenegger’s Before, During, and After Baby Instagram series. “So I didn’t want that breakdown with Honor, so we went to therapy together.”

Alba told People in October 2021 that she wants to “destigmatise” mother-daughter counseling after she sought help because she couldn’t stop treating her older daughter like a child. “There really isn’t one sort of recipe that works across the board,” she said. “I just wanted to be able to show up for her.”