Alexa PenaVega has credited her mother with helping her navigate child stardom

And now that she’s a mother of two kids - Ocean, three, and Kingston, 15 months, whom she has with her husband and ‘Big Time Rush’ star Carlos PenaVega - of her own, Alexa understands how much her mother had to “give up” in order to help her achieve her dreams.

She explained: "My mom was a single mom for a long time and she raised three kids and took me to every audition with my sisters. It was the four of us and we would travel everywhere.

“My sisters, they could be hanging out with their friends, going to birthday parties, doing all those things, but instead, they were traveling with us because my mom wanted to make sure to keep the family together. Because a lot of the horror stories you do hear, it's when all these families get split up. When you don't have the parent actually raising the kids, it's whoever they're around that actually ends up influencing them and raising them.

"My mom worked really hard in giving a lot up for me to be able to get to the place that I did.”

Alexa also praised the ‘Spy Kids’ crew for creating a child-friendly environment on set, because she doesn’t think she was forced to grow up too soon like other young stars.

She added: "They wanted us to be kids. So on our lunch breaks, we would all go out in the field and we'd be looking for scorpions and lizards and crazy things because we were shooting at these abandoned airport hangars.

“And my sisters, if they weren't doing schoolwork, they were in the prop house learning how to make their own solar ovens and making their own computers because the prop guys were so cool that they wanted to teach all these kids. It just gave us a very different upbringing."

And because Alexa had positive experiences with being a young star, she wouldn’t hesitate to let her two sons follow in her footsteps if they desired.

She told People magazine: "As long as we teach them healthy boundaries and that they don't have to fit the mould of the industry, that you can create your own mould, then I would say go for it.”