Expert debunks mom medical myths with star of Netflix's 'Black Summer' Jaime King

Abby Haglage
Updated ·2 min read

Mom knows best, right? Well, not exactly, says Jennifer Caudle, D.O., a board-certified family physician in New Jersey. In an interview testing out that theory, Caudle sat down with the star of Netflix’s Black Summer, Jamie King, who is mother herself to two boys, James Knight, 5, and Leo Thames, 3.

“Being a mom is the most thrilling, extraordinary, terrifying, horrifying — it’s like every emotion you can feel jammed into one,” says King. While the actress now has a family of her own, it wasn’t long ago that she was fielding advice from her own mom. One of them, fittingly enough, being about TV.

“My mom would say, ‘don’t sit too close to the TV or you’ll go blind,” says King. But, according to Caudle, that’s false. “Kids are super resilient, they can actually tolerate sitting closer to a TV than adults can,” she tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “The one thing we just want to make sure that they don’t actually have near sightedness underlying — but honestly, you’re not going to go blind if you sit close to the TV.”

Another piece of advice King says her mom offered was to apply sunscreen 30 minutes before going out in the sun. “You don’t have to wait 30 minutes, 15 minutes is fine,” says Caudle. “You want to make sure you rub it all in and it has time to dry — that’s probably the most important thing.”

In Black Summer, King stars as a mother ripped from her daughter in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. She forgoes food and water for days in the quest to find her, teaming up with other “refugees” in search of their own loved ones. Black Summer premiered on Netflix this April. To find out more about mom myths, watch Yahoo Lifestyle’s video above.

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