Shawn Johnson East and her husband, Andrew East, have been intentional when it comes to sharing photos of their three children on social media.
“It’s very, very selective and it will be up to them because Drew is now becoming 5 years old and you could have a conversation with her. It’s more so up to them,” Shawn, 33, exclusively told Us Weekly on Tuesday, March 18, while discussing her partnership with Beam Kids. “I don’t ever want to cross a boundary where I’m showing something that they wouldn’t want. Everything we try to show, I would never want them to be embarrassed by.”
She added, “I’m not outing their most vulnerable moments. I’m not showing them in exposing ways. My husband and I always say at the end of the day, our social media is about us as parents and not them as kids.”
Shawn and Andrew, also 33, have been married since 2016 and share daughter Drew, 5, as well as sons Jett, 3, and Bear, 15 months.
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“I do think soon, like, as our kids graduate to a certain age, they will be off of social media because they become real little people around the world,” she added to Us. “It’ll be up to them if they want to be seen.”
Since expanding their family, Shawn and Andrew have frequently documented their little ones’ milestones on social media and via YouTube vlogs. As Drew, Jett and Bear grow up, the couple made a conscious decision to limit their children’s presence via social media uploads.
“We show our children less and less as they get older because they’re becoming more and more recognizable. They’re no longer just infants and babies, but they’re becoming people and they have opinions,” Shawn explained on Tuesday. “I don’t want my daughter to go to kindergarten and have people be like, ‘Oh, I saw your vacation.’ It’s more of a parent’s perspective of what we’re going through.”
The retired gymnast continued, “It’s always a very fluid conversation that my husband and I are having. We always deem it as shareable home videos [and] we have the unedited versions, where it’s all the moments that are so sweet that we get to experience and then we try to share it with the world in a relatable way.”
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Shawn and Andrew’s parenting journey also inspired their partnership with performance supplement brand Beam to launch a youth-oriented version made with a chocolate milk flavor and over 40 nutrients, including a probiotic, a multivitamin and a greens blend.
“I worked with my pediatrician, a dietician, everything, and I made it for my kiddos,” Shawn said on Tuesday. “I got really frustrated trying to piece together all the different supplements for kids and they’re all in gummy form and I just felt like I was giving them candy and, by the time I was buying all of them, you’re buying, like, five different things and I just got frustrated.”
According to Shawn, she and her former football player husband also make their own protein shakes with Beam nutrients each morning.
“It’s something that our kids can’t have and they always wanted to have their own protein shake,” Shawn quipped. “We were making fake chocolate milk stuff and whatever, long story short, Beam, [created by] Matt Lombardi, ended up making this for our children. They got to go to the lab and pick out their own flavors, and then after they had been using theirs for six months, we were kind of like, ‘We should maybe share this with people.’”
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
