Matt and Abby Howard have established “boundaries” when it comes to filming family content.
The influencers — who have been married since July 2019 and share sons Griffin, nearly 3, and August, 22 months — have set screen time rules and made a strict work schedule in light of some past controversial posts.
“When we’re not working, we’re not working. Like, that’s it,” Abby, 26, explained on the “Jinger and Jeremy” podcast on Wednesday, June 25. “It’s really hard, especially for the way Matt’s brain operates. It’s really hard to, like, dabble in anything. It’s like he’s all in or all out. And for me, I just don’t want my kids to see me. If I’m able to put this boundary up then I, for sure, want to have the phones away. We don’t just have cameras out.”
Abby noted that they try to make evenings about “us time” and rarely make videos outside of their designated work hours — which they created to limit the presence of social media in all aspects of their life.
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“Boundaries means, like, literally no phones,” she added. “We’ll text family members and friends and stuff, like, send a text or FaceTime people when the kids are around, but it’s not like we’re making videos or stuff like that. It’s been really, really refreshing, honestly, because it felt like a lot for a while — social media can feel all consuming if you let it be and it felt good to reclaim some boundaries.”
Before establishing their new day-to-day routine, the couple — who have over 5 million TikTok followers — made headlines in September 2024 when Abby revealed via Instagram Stories that she and Matt, 27, went to dinner without their boys during a cruise vacation — and used FaceTime to monitor them in their room.
In the post, Abby explained that they brought Griffin and August to the cruise ship dinners at first, but after five nights, “it became apparent that they weren’t enjoying it and therefore we weren’t either.”
“So THEN we switched our dinner time to AFTER their bedtime and FaceTimed the monitors while we ate,” she added, noting that their baby monitors “don’t work on board” the ship “unless you’re only like 10 feet away,” so their solution “worked out muchhhh better for everyone.”
Followers were outraged and left a flurry of messages.
A source told Us Weekly at the time, however, that the families the Howards were vacationing with on the cruise had “rooms right next door to each other and they were taking turns being there,” adding that the kids “were never alone and the use of the baby monitors was an extra precaution.”
Prior to that controversy, Matt and Abby also faced criticism for their “traditional” marital roles, making their own baby formula and canceling Father’s Day.
The “Unplanned” podcast hosts told Jinger Duggar and Jeremy Vuolo that their goal in starting their brand was to focus on their story of getting married young. Their vision soon pivoted into something else once they became parents, which was a hard transition.
“I hadn’t really thought through my life past moving to paradise and being married [to] my best friend. Like, I hadn’t really thought about parenthood,” Matt explained of how sharing his life via social media changed. “And so, I’m documenting everything as it’s happening and, just until recently, I’ve really started to just not share as much and to take more time for me and have more privacy and be like, ‘OK, who am I now, what’s my identity? How do I be the best dad for my kids? And who is Matt Howard as a father?’ And I’ve been figuring that out because I want to continue to put out good things in the world, but I also need to protect myself and protect my family at the same time.”
“Ultimately, we want people to follow our pages for us, if they choose to follow, and not because of our kids,” Abby said. “Also, it may seem like we’re always recording, but the truth is it’s very, very structured. … We have work hours and usually our kids are not present — well, they’re in the house — but we don’t show them.”
“We used to not have structure to our days,” Matt added. “But now, we do.”
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Abby also mentioned that they wanted to keep the “community” and “space” that they built on YouTube and social media but needed to have “a degree of separation” once their kids were more involved. The podcast accomplished that goal.
“I was actually really afraid to tell our friends and family that we were pregnant with our second child. We waited a minute because I was like, ‘They’re gonna be judging us because I’m low-key judging us.’ Like, this is really close together,” Abby explained. “But then the more we talked about, [followers were] like, ‘Same, 15 months apart, 13 months apart.’ And they’re sending messages of hope. They’re like, ‘Now they’re 21 and 22 and their best friends.’ Like, it was really cool. And so that was a really fun, exciting way to kick it off, too … we knew we were gonna need a change, too, because with having two little kids, something’s gonna have to shift.”
