Matt Damon delivered a “beautiful” piece of parenting advice to fellow dad Jason Kelce during this week’s episode of the “New Heights” podcast, leaving at least one listener in tears on the way to work.
The actor was promoting his upcoming film “The Rip” and shared some behind-the-scenes info about filming next year’s “The Odyssey,” but he seemed to leave the biggest impression on listeners by reflecting on the growth of his children while chatting with the former Philadelphia Eagle and his superstar brother and co-host, Travis Kelce.
Damon has three daughters with his wife, Luciana Barroso: Isabella, Gia and Stella. The “Good Will Hunting” star also helped raise his stepdaughter, Alexia, whom Barroso had from a prior relationship before marrying Damon in 2005.
Damon left a mark on “New Heights” fans after saying he still sees “their infant face” when he looks at his children, and recalled getting some cherished advice from “an old friend” when Gia was still a toddler: “Don’t blink. Don’t blink.”
“And that shit is real,” Damon said. “My daughter broke her collarbone, and this morning she was getting ready for school; she’s 17. She asked me to brush her hair. So I brushed her hair, and man, it was a moment. I hadn’t brushed her hair, I don’t know, eight, nine years?”
He then directly addressed Jason Kelce, whose own four daughters with Kylie Kelce are still quite young: Wyatt, 6; Elliotte, 4; Bennett, 2; and 9-month-old Finnley.
“You’re at that stage now where it’s like, you get them ready, they’re lined up!” Damon told the fellow dad. “I don’t remember when I brushed her hair for the last time. It just kind of happened, and life kind of kept going.”
Damon said that the changes in aging were “so incremental” that he only realized how much time had passed when he “ran the hairbrush” through Gia’s hair. He then admitted, “It buckled me, man,” before passing on some old advice: “So, don’t blink.”
Ashley Landis/Associated Press
Jason Kelce took those words to heart, saying, “I like that.”
While that response was rather stoic, Damon’s reflective anecdote reduced some listeners of the podcast to mush. As their heartfelt reactions on social media suggested, they, too, appear to have found that parenting moves too fast.
“Matt Damon had me crying with this one, it goes too fast,” wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter, with another person commenting: “This is typically a lighthearted, funny show, but this is beautiful parenting advice from Matt Damon.”
Another user confessed,“I’m not crying. You’re crying.”
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