Joan Lunden Still Has the Energy to Keep Up With Seven Kids After Battling Breast Cancer

Former Good Morning America co-host Joan Lunden lit up when she started talking about her seven kids while at the Susan G. Komen North Jersey Race for the Cure in West Orange, NJ.

“I’m running home after this to go to four soccer games! And I’m missing flag football!” Joan, 64, who is the mother of four grade school–aged children, tells Closer exclusively. “I also have three
older daughters; two of them work with me.”

Joan with twins Max and Kate in May 2004.

“She is really warm and friendly,” says an observer at the May 3 race, where Joan, who overcame a rare and aggressive breast cancer last year, served as the honorary survivor ambassador. “It’s her nature to be nurturing.”

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That’s for sure! That side of Joan is in full effect when she comes home to her youngest kids: Kate and Max, 11, and Kimberly and Jack, 10. Though she admits that later-in-life parenting “is not for everyone,” Joan says, “it’s energizing to me. I’m a person who just has always taken on life at full speed. So I think that I was wise in my choice.”

Joan with her older daughters Lindsay, Sarah and Jamie in 2006.

Joan’s older daughters from her first marriage, Lindsay, Sarah and Jamie, were already on their way to being independent when Joan and her husband, Jeff Konigsberg, expanded their family with two sets of newborn twins born via surrogate in 2003 and 2005. “I just wasn’t finished having children yet,” she said at the time.

But raising kids today, in an era of smartphones and social media, has been a challenge. “It was much easier when they had to go to a party to see their friends,” she says.

To read the full story on Joan, pick up the new issue of Closer Weekly on newsstands now!