Patricia Heaton warns women not to wait too long to have children

The ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ star and her husband, David Hunt, produced and directed the movie ‘Unexpected,’ available now on Prime Video

Patricia Heaton advises couples wanting to have kids to start trying as early as possible.

The “Everybody Loves Raymond” star, who, alongside her husband, produced the movie “Unexpected,” which is about a couple’s infertility journey, told Fox News Digital that one of the roadblocks for couples dealing with the issue is that “people are waiting longer to try and get pregnant.”

“So they’re in their 30s before they’re trying. And I understand that we’re living in a different time now. You might feel like, in your 20s, you’re not ready, you can’t afford it. But, if at all possible, the earlier you start, the better,” Heaton said. “You have better chances because once you get in your 30s, and then you realize there’s an issue, the clock is really ticking.”

In 2020, Heaton called motherhood “indescribable.”

“Being a mother is indescribable; joy, worry, delight, frustration, but ultimately the greatest satisfaction and deepest human love of your life. So grateful,” she wrote in an Instagram post in 2020 along with a throwback photo of her boys when they were young.

Heaton and her husband, David Hunt, met in the late 1980s and have been married since October 1990. They share four grown sons together who inspired the name of their production company, FourBoys Entertainment.

Their children are Samuel, 31, John, 29, Joseph, 27 and Daniel, 26.

Heaton and Hunt spoke with Fox News Digital about balancing their marriage and the challenges that sometimes come with working together.

“We’re both actors with strong opinions,” the actress told Fox News Digital. “Dave was the director, so there’s that.”

Heaton, a producer on “Unexpected,” said she would sit next to Hunt while he was directing and, although she has no interest in being a director herself, “I do have opinions.”

“So, we would sit at the monitors together, and I just made sure he had it before he leapt out of his chair to go talk to the actors,” she said.

Hunt added that it took the couple “a minute,” but they were eventually able to set up a “routine” for working together.

“I got so passionate about it,” he said of directing the movie, “my headphones would come up, and I’d fly on set and I would hear, ‘Wait wait, wait, I’ve got notes,’ and ‘Oh, hang on,’ so we would always say I wouldn’t rush onto set until we had conferred, if she had anything cogent to say.”