Jennifer Love Hewitt Shares the Sweet Thing Son Atticus Did After Seeing Her Film ‘Really Hard Scene’ on 9-1-1 (Exclusive)

Jennifer Love Hewitt recently had a special visitor on the set of 9-1-1.

In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, the actress, 45, shares how her 9-year-old son Atticus got to spend the day with her at work on a day off from school.

“Seeing what I get to do for a living through his eyes was so cool,” Hewitt says. “We got to eat lunch together in my trailer, and I had this really hard scene that I had to do where I was crying and he was just rubbing my back at the end of it, and he told me how proud he was. He was like, ‘Mommy, you work so hard. Thank you for working so hard.’ It was really sweet.”

Hewitt says all three of her kids — Atticus, Autumn, 11, and Aidan, 3, whom she shares with husband Brian Hallisay — are “massive” 9-1-1 fans “totally separate from me.”

“I did not ask them to watch it,” she says. “They actually just watched it because some of their friends wanted to see it, and now they love it.”

Hewitt joined the TV drama as Maddie Han for season 2 in 2018. When she first got the call about the project, “they were like, ‘Hey, they’re looking for a Jennifer Love Hewitt type on this show,'” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Well, I am that type.'”

She was sold when she heard about who Maddie was.

“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to do this. She’s different,’ ” she says. “It has been absolutely amazing.”

Since her first day on 9-1-1 (which returns to ABC on March 6), Hewitt says she made clear that she has “to be a mom first and an actress second.”

“They really allow me to do that there on that show,” she says. “I mean, they know that I’m a hard worker and I love being there, and I give it my all when I’m there, but they are very kind and loving about the fact that I want to be with my kids. I want my kids to feel like they come first in our little world.”

Now that her two eldest kids are “tweenagers,” though, she says they “want to send mommy off to work.”

“They wish that I would just be at 9-1-1 all the time because they think it’s the coolest show ever,” she says. “It’s just the best job, truly. It’s amazing.”

Autumn, Atticus and Aidan recently got to join their parents in the new Lifetime Christmas movie The Holiday Junkie, which premiered Dec. 14. The film was inspired by Hewitt’s love of the holidays and the grief of losing her mom Pat to cancer at 67 in 2012.

“Aidan is in the little snow scene, and Autumn and Atticus are in two scenes, so it was a real family affair,” Hewitt says. “It’s like our little Christmas love letter that we’ll always have.”

Hewitt further tells her family’s story in her new book Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical.

“I’m really proud of the book, genuinely,” she says. “It was hard to write about grief and kind of scary to put my kids on the cover and show our life and everything, but it was exciting to write about who we are and what we believe in in hopes that it inspires people.”

For more on Jennifer Love Hewitt, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.