Sarah Michelle Gellar Reveals Why Her One Piece of Parenting Advice Involves Caviar (Exclusive)

• Sarah Michelle Gellar jokingly tells PEOPLE that her “one advice” for parents is “don’t teach your children to like caviar”
• “My children think that that’s what you should celebrate with every time,” she told PEOPLE. “Um, that is not a realistic expectation”
• Gellar also said she gets her and Freddie Prinze Jr. ‘s two kids — daughter Charlotte, 15, and son Rocky, 12 — to help in the kitchen as much as possible

Sarah Michelle Gellar’s advice for parents? Keep the caviar out of reach!

While chatting with PEOPLE in New York City last month, the actress — who shares kids Charlotte, 15, and Rocky, 12, with husband Freddie Prinze Jr. — revealed that when fellow parents seek her counsel, there is one pearl of wisdom she (half-jokingly) offers up every time.

“People always ask me for advice with kids,” the Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum, 48, said. “And our running joke is — I don’t like to give people advice, ’cause everyone’s life is different — but my one advice is: Don’t teach your children to like caviar.”

Her reasoning? The pricey dish is now an “expectation” in her and Prinze’s house, not the exception.

“My children think that that’s what you should celebrate with every time,” the Los Angeles-based actress said before adding, “Um, that is not a realistic expectation.”

But the kids do get to enjoy the salty treat sometimes, including Charlotte’s 13th birthday party back in September 2022.

“My daughter told me she wanted a cocktails and caviar spa party for her 13 birthday… so we had to make that happen,” Gellar shared on Instagram at the time — and clarified that it was, of course, “mocktails for the kids and cocktails for the moms.”

And, whether or not a special treat is involved, the Scooby-Doo star likes to get her kids involved in the kitchen — which has been both a blessing and a curse, she told PEOPLE.

“It started as, like, ownership and wanting to taste what they had a hand in. And now it’s gotten to the point where they can cook for themselves,” the mom of two said. “Although my son did text me at 4 in the morning this morning saying, ‘Mom, I’m hungry and everyone is asleep in the house.’ ”

When asked — jokingly — if there was any cereal available for him to snack on, the actress laughed and said, “That’s what I thought! That’s literally what I … but I was too tired to acknowledge. I was like, ‘That’s what cereal is for.’ ”

“But,” Gellar added, “my kids think they should get a meal. Cereal is like the last thing on their list.”

Gellar and Prinze, 49, first met on the set of 1997’s I Know What You Did Last Summer, and developed a friendship before connecting romantically a few years later. They got engaged in 2001, said “I do” in 2002 and welcomed daughter Charlotte in 2009. Rocky arrived a few years later, in 2012.

And despite both her and Prinze Jr.’s iconic filmographies, Gellar’s children don’t like to watch her movies very often, the actress recently revealed.

“I mean, my kids find it pretty cringe,” she told Glamour in March. “I think they think they have better things to do than watch me on something, but they’ll watch my friends on stuff.”