Ben Affleck says his ex-wife Jennifer Garner’s parenting prowess leaves him feeling like he’s barely passing.
Affleck, 52, opened up about their shared custody arrangement during an interview with TODAY’s Willie Geist, breaking down how the former couple trades off time with their three children: Violet, 20, Fin, 17, and Samuel, 14. The actor explained that he works hard during his weeks, then heads home to pick the kids up from school and hopes they’ll agree to hang out with him for dinner. “They’re with me for a week, then with their mom for a week,” he continued.
“Their mom is spectacular, and always makes me feel like I’m coming up a little short,” Affleck confessed to Geist.
He then revealed the brutal honesty his kids deliver when he tries to grade his own performance. “I think I’m doing about 75 percent as good as your mom – and they’re like, ‘Maybe 40 percent’,” he shared. “I’m maxing out,” Affleck joked. “B+.”
The candid parenting admission comes shortly after Garner, 52, stepped in to head off a potential professional collision between the ex-spouses. Affleck was already directing the upcoming Netflix thriller Animals when lead actor Matt Damon dropped out, prompting the Gone Girl star to take on the role himself. The casting shuffle would have placed Affleck opposite Garner as her on-screen husband in a tense thriller centered on a rocky marriage.
Recognizing the media firestorm that would follow, Garner advised him against the move. “I talked to Jen, and she was like, ‘We don’t wanna do that. You just get baggage’,” Affleck said. Garner ultimately exited the project entirely.
Affleck’s self-deprecating parenting commentary fits a pattern of blunt honesty about family life. He previously recounted how his youngest son, Samuel, once asked for a $6,000 pair of Dior shoes during a shopping trip. Affleck told the teen he’d need to mow a lot of lawns to cover that price tag. “Well, if you want that, you can work 1,000 hours at minimum wage – and if you work 1,000 hours, you might not want to spend it on a pair of shoes,” he recalled telling him. When Samuel pointed out that they had the money, Affleck fired back that he had the money while his son was broke.
The actor’s perspective on family has deepened following the recent deaths of both his parents. Timothy Affleck died in April at 76, and his ex-wife Chris passed away in June at 83. “It’s sort of a big thing, and it’s caused me to start thinking about my own childhood in ways that has been a little bit different,” Affleck said during an appearance on the Streets We Grew Up On podcast. “I learned to be able to look at things that I wish were different about my childhood and say they did their best. They were dealing with their own stuff and their own childhood trauma.”
Affleck and Garner married in 2005 and finalized their divorce in 2018, maintaining a notably amicable co-parenting relationship in the years since.
