Ben Affleck Reveals the Very Relatable Reason His Daughter Violet, 14, 'Teases' Him

Ben Affleck‘s daughter Violet likes poking fun at her dad!

At the Miami screening of The Way Back on Tuesday, Affleck — who plays a high school basketball coach struggling to keep his life together in the movie — shared that his 14-year-old daughter with ex-wife Jennifer Garner likes to “tease” him over his use of emojis and group chat ability.

When asked if he uses emojis, the 47-year-old actor said he’s “learning a lot” about “everything that’s going on.”

“My daughter is so funny, she teases me, she’s 14 and she’s like ‘Why do they let you on this group chat? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t pretend you have any idea what’s going on,'” Affleck said his daughter told to him after she discovered he was in a group chat with his younger costars.

“Then she’s like, ‘What are they saying on the group chat?’ which is only appropriate very rarely for my daughter, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s a way to stay in touch. It’s fun.”

Earlier in the interview, Affleck’s costar Melvin Gregg revealed that the star had asked him to add him to a group chat with The Way Back cast.

“I remember the last day, we were all saying goodbye — we did a huddle thing, ‘Hazel on three!’ and we were talking about a group chat and Ben was like ‘add me to the group chat.'” Gregg said.

“I’m trying to get a little cooler,” Affleck interjected, jokingly adding “What is this group chat thing?”

Affleck and his costars were also joined by Reverend Billy Thompson, a former basketball player who struggled with substance abuse and now serves as chaplain for the Miami Heat.

Thompson says he connected to the movie because it showed how important having support around when trying to find sobriety.

“What we see in the movie that I thought was great is that, there is always going to be that point where you hit the floor, where you face falls down and you don’t have anything else to turn to but your friends,” he says. “There’s this issue with family being on your side.”

Garner, 47, previously opened up about Violet’s relationship with technology and social media, explaining in October 2019 that she won’t let Violet join Instagram.

On an episode of Katie Couric‘s podcast, Next Question with Katie Couric, Garner opened up about her parenting style saying, “Without even having parents who are well-known, I worry about all kids having to deal with this new pressure.”

“My daughter’s at an all-girl school, and it’s a huge problem. She’ll occasionally talk to me about getting Instagram, and I can see why because I’m on there and it’s something kind of fun that I do, and I am modeling the opposite of what I want for her to do,” she continued.

“How often is that in parenting?”

“I just say, ‘When you can show me studies that say that teenage girls are happier using Instagram than not, then we can have the conversation,’” the actress added. “‘But everything you look at, I don’t see anything positive for you out there. You can look at mine when you want to, we can go over it together, but I just don’t see it.’”

Affleck and Garner also share daughter Seraphina Rose, 11, and son Samuel, 7. The former couple finalized their divorce in October 2018 after announcing their separation in June 2015.

In a new interview with The New York Times, published Tuesday, Affleck reflected on his own mistakes while discussing his new film, admitting, “The biggest regret of my life is this divorce.”

“Shame is really toxic,” he continued. “There is no positive byproduct of shame. It’s just stewing in a toxic, hideous feeling of low self-worth and self-loathing.”

“I drank relatively normally for a long time,” he told the outlet. “What happened was that I started drinking more and more when my marriage was falling apart. This was 2015, 2016. My drinking, of course, created more marital problems.”

The former couple first started dating in 2004 and got married the following year.