Former Child Star Puts Family First — Always
By Movieguide® Contributor
Actress Melissa Joan Hart has always put her family first.
She recently opened up about how she — the oldest of eight — used her early earnings to support her siblings.
“You know, the money that I made on commercials and CLARISSA or any of my acting jobs, it always went to the family,” Hart said on the GOOD MORNING AMERICA “Pop Culture Moms” podcast.
“I got to go pick out a Barbie and like, as I got older, some people were like, ‘Oh, that’s not right. You should have kept your money,’” she recalled. “And I was like…I would rather put food on the table and make sure my siblings had good clothes and bicycles for Christmas, you know, things like that. So, I definitely felt like I wanted to be responsible for them.”
Not only did Hart provide for her siblings financially, but she also opened up her home to them.
Hart’s mother, Paula, once left all her siblings at Hart’s house when she went on vacation.
“She left to go to Mexico, and I had a 6-month-old, a 7-year-old, 9-year-old, 13-year-old and a 15-year-old in the house,” Hart said.
“I know that my 15-year-old sister disappeared,” she recalled of the time. “She went to a friend’s house and didn’t come home, but I figured [out] where she was. The other one I had to get on a bus in the morning, and then the other two I had to walk across the street. Then I had to bottle feed the other one all morning, change diapers and order pizza. I don’t remember how I did it.”
She added that her mom “would never have left if she didn’t know I could do that.”
All the hard work and responsibility Hart put into her siblings when she was younger helped her to be a parent when it was time for her to have kids.
“I was a better mom for it,” the mom of three said.
She’s still putting her family’s well-being first, though now her energy is directed at her sons — Mason, 18, Braydon, 16, and Tucker, 11 — who she shares with husband Mark Wilkerson. One way she does this is by emphasizing faith and helping others.
In 2019, she introduced Mason to her work with World Vision in Zambia.
“Hart is making sure that her passion for giving back is passed down to her three sons,” World Vision wrote at the time. “The actress has maintained a successful Hollywood career for decades, but in between projects, she’s all about doing what she can for others.”
“I think this is so important for our boys to see the work that World Vision does, to see that there are other parts of the world that are struggling, other parts of the world that are able to be developed and enriched and that that we can do so much good with our time, our energy, our money, to be able to help out people in need so far away,” she said after a family trip to Zambia. “I think it’s crucial to show our kids good charitable works.”
Movieguide® previously reported on Hart’s faith:
Actress Melissa Joan Hart opened up about her faith journey and the “born-again” moment that changed how she views the Holy Spirit.
“I think that all through my life faith has always been there for me,” she told CBN. “As I talk to myself as I go through my day, I’m always going to God.”
Hart was raised Catholic and began attending a Presbyterian church with her husband, Mark Wilkerson, who was a Baptist.
Even though the actress was raised Christian, she revealed that she didn’t truly understand the Holy Spirit and the Trinity until she was an adult.
“I did have a born-again, Holy Spirit moment,” she shared with the Christian Post. “I never really understood the Holy Spirit or the Trinity in a sense. One day, we were in Bible study, and it just hit, like the Holy Spirit made sense to me all of a sudden!”
