Heather Dubrow is a parenting pro after raising four kids — and she's ready to share all her secrets.
The Real Housewives of Orange County star, 55, recently spoke with PEOPLE about her new partnership with Life360, sharing that one way she's been able to keep up her relationships with all four of her kids — Nick, 20, Max, 20, Kat, 17, and Ace, 13, whom she shares with husband Terry Dubrow, 65 — is to get them involved in a family locator app.
"I've been using Life360 for a decade with the kids — when they were little, when they were new drivers, when they were in college, seeing where they are at night, making sure everyone's home," Heather says of the app. "But Terry had this mini-stroke last summer and he disappeared and we just couldn't find him."
The mom of four was able to use Life360 to find her husband and thankfully brought him to a hospital. "And it's literally what saved his life," Heather says of the app. "I mean without it it could have ended up very, very differently."
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It's not always easy to get teenagers or young adults on board with an app that would track their locations, but when it came to the Dubrows, Terry was surprisingly the hardest one to convince.
"They started so young that it was just part of their daily lives," Heather says of her kids. "Honestly, the one that was the most convincing was Terry. He'd be like, 'My God, what if I just want to sit outside?'"
"So Terry was saying, 'What if I leave work and I want to go to Starbucks and I just want to sit in the car?' I go, 'No one cares. No one cares if you're sitting outside of Starbucks. Go do your thing.' It's not a stalker-y thing, you know what I mean?"
Throughout the past few years, Heather and Terry's family has gone through some changes as their kids have come forward about the different ways that they identify. The couple announced in 2023 that their child, Ace, is transgender. Their older daughter Max identifies as bisexual and their younger daughter Kat came out as lesbian.
"Listen, four kids, different genders, different sexualities, and the best advice I can give to any parent, no matter who or what their kids are or identify as, is communication," Heather tells PEOPLE.
"I was raised in a very 1950s household and people really didn't talk about things. Things were swept under the rug and I didn't want that for my family. And so it's always been very clear communication and really the most important thing is to listen."
"Because I think as parents we want to impart our wisdom on our kids and give them advice and fix them and share our stories and all that, but they just want to be heard," adds the proud mom.
It's also important for Heather to be vocal about LGBTQIA+ issues, especially since her platform has grown so much.
"I was given this crazy platform and I never really knew why," she says. "I mean, I was an actress for many years and then had four kids in seven years and then embarked on this crazy reality thing by happenstance, left the show and then was asked to come back and thought, 'Okay well, wouldn't it be cool if I can use this platform to start conversations in other people's families?'"
"I think anyone with a platform that can help other families and show them what all of our normal families look like is awesome," Heather says.
"And look, our kids didn't ask to be born. We had them," she continues. "And so if nothing else, your parents should be the ones that are standing up for you, defending you, loving you, and making you the absolute best you could be. That's our job."
Communication has always been key for Heather, who prioritized parenting her kids in different ways from the beginning.
"I think that parenting children, it's not one size fits all," Heather says. "No matter who they are or how they identify. We have four kids and two of them are twins. I mean [they were] literally raised at the same exact time, and so that nature/nurture thing, that's a lot of crap. They pretty much come out the way they come out and so you really have to adjust your parenting to the needs of your child, period."
Although her kids are all in different stages of life, there is one rule that she and Terry always come back to.
"I'm in charge," Heather jokes. "That's pretty much how it goes."
She's partly kidding, but the proud mom says that her relationship with her kids has changed as they've grown out of the little-kid stage of life.
"I mean they'll always need me, but especially when they were little-little and I loved it and it was great, but I really took on a lot of that role," she shares. "So as they've gotten older, you have to sort of reimagine what that looks like."
"I don't know if we have a hard and fast rule, except again, just communication is really key and being supportive of each other. They don't play us off each other. They try sometimes, but we'll always come back and say, 'Hey, this is how I feel about this. I'm not okay with this.'"
Above all else, Heather is just glad to be raising kids that she can spend time with.
"Look, I'm not perfect, none of us are perfect, but as the kids get older and as we get along, they're so interesting and becoming such interesting, cool people that I really enjoy being with," she says.
"Sometimes it's challenging, but it's really great."
