Jackie and Evan Goldschneider Share How Being Parents to 4 Kids Changed Their Relationship

Jackie Goldschneider and Evan Goldschneider will celebrate 15 years of marriage later this year — and as you might imagine, a lot has changed for The Real Housewives of New Jersey couple in a decade-and-a-half, including the fact that they are not just two but are now a family of six as parents to two sets of twins, Jonas and Adin, as well as Hudson and Alexis.

Jackie shared in an exclusive interview with Bravo Insider that while she and Evan were both career-focused pre-kids, date nights were still "easier before we had kids. Because at night when we would both come home from work, we were just together. I mean, we watched stupid TV, on the weekends we didn’t work. I never really worked as a young lawyer; I very occasionally worked on the weekends. Evan didn’t really work on weekends. So we had all that time together."

During the same phone interview with Bravo Insider, Evan added, "And it was so much easier living in the city. We would wait an hour for a movie, for our movie, and we wouldn’t be looking at our watch or anything. But now with everything, and it’s harder with kids because we’re constantly going one place or another. We try to make time for each other before coronavirus. We’d go out to dinner, sometimes we’d just have date nights. I probably see you [Jackie] more now that I’m home with the pandemic. I’m working from home."

Jackie reflected a bit more on life before working remotely became the norm for her husband, who works in finance. "When Evan was working in the city, he would leave [for the office] before I even woke up in the morning and come home, and then he’d hit the gym and then he was just with the kids," she said. "So then we would be driving to basketball and sports, and I worked all day from home. And I would do all, like, the pick-ups and drop-offs and everything. But, you know, we always tried to do a date night."

But being parents to four kids hasn't just totally shifted life for the couple, especially in the last year. As is the case for everyone, the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions in place because of it have changed everything for the Garden State pair.

Jackie added, "But now we can’t go anywhere. So, our kids have school two days a week. And when they’re gone, we try to find a little time for each other. But usually in the evenings, [we] watch TV together and the kids watch their own crap in the guest room, and we sit on the couch together and we spend time together. So, it’s what we have."

Not only is alone time different for Jackie and Evan, but so is also how they approach the kinds of activities they allow their kids to partake in. "There’s a lot of guilt because kids don’t fully understand what’s going on. Even though they do understand it, there are still things going on that we don’t consider super safe. But we have to make a lot of tough parenting choices that we’ve never had to make before," she said. "But we got to know them [the kids] a lot better [during this time]."

Evan did like the time at home with their kids amid the COVID-19 pandemic as a "camp experience in the cloud of something that really, really bad globally happened."

Once the family can return to a more normal routine in the future, they have plans. "I can’t wait to be able to travel with the kids. I want to take them all over the world. Our kids [Jonas and Adin] are getting bar mitzvah-ed on April 3, and we were originally supposed to do that in Israel with our parents. And that’s not happening, so we are having a home bar mitzvah. So, we’re in the process of preparing all of that now. So I’m excited for that," Jackie said. "I’m excited to go back to Westhampton, ‘cause we did a huge renovation on our beach house this year. We redid the entire outside. It used to be green and have an old-fashioned door and everything. And we completely redid it. I redid the whole deck and the pool and whole outside. Everything. So it looks just phenomenal. So last summer when we were there, all the restaurants were closed and, like, no one’s really going anywhere. And I’m excited to, like, go back when things are back open, and we can really enjoy it and go shopping, go out for ice cream, go out to dinner, all that."

Evan has a few things in mind he'd like to do again as well: "I like baby steps. I might do hot yoga and actually go to a real gym. I’m gonna take it one step at a time. But I want to travel. For me, the whole point of getting older and wiser is seeing the world and not being in a cocoon. One of my favorite things is just seeing different cultures and being immersed in that culture. When Jackie and I met, we took all these trips. First we went to Turkey, we went to Israel, we went to Europe. We went to a lot of different places within the U.S. We went to Charleston and we went to Nashville, we went to so many different cities... You could either spend your money on items like cars or things, which frankly don’t mean much to me, or experiences. Seeing the world and giving yourself a proper perspective, and the only way to get that perspective is to be open-minded and to kind of see every culture. So that’s what I want to get back to. It’s hard with four kids. "

Jackie recalled, "We went everywhere [back then]. We just didn’t want to stop traveling because we knew that life would settle down."

Evan does see a silver lining in what everyone has experienced in the last year: "I think 20 years from now, [our kids are] gonna remember 2020 as, obviously, the first thing, it’s a tragic year for all the people that died. But they’re gonna look at it and they’re gonna say, 'Wow, we had a really fun year in spite of all that, being together. Being with our parents and all four of us together.'"

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