Nikki DeLoach Says She Found Her Voice During Son’s Life-Saving Surgeries

If there’s a silver lining to be found in hard times, longtime Hallmark star Nikki DeLoach is bound to find it. The actress is notorious for finding the good while facing her fair share of tough stuff, including seeing son Bennett, her second child with husband Ryan Goodell, through three life-saving surgeries.

Now seven, Bennett was born in 2017 with multiple life-threatening congenital heart defects (CHDs), requiring three heart surgeries — the first at just five days old — at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA). The unknowns surrounding his health were terrifying for DeLoach’s family, but on May 21, 2025, she told Us Weekly that one silver lining of the experience was that it forced her to find her voice and speak up for what matters.

Nikki DeLoach Says Advocating for Her Son Taught Her How to Advocate for Others

Raised in Georgia, DeLoach said she was taught “to be seen and not heard.” But that way of being didn’t fly when her child was in crisis, needing someone to advocate for him.

“Your job is to advocate for your child throughout the entire process,” she told Us Weekly, “to ask for what you need, to speak up whenever you don’t understand something, and to protect your child at all costs. You have to learn how to become empowered in your own body and in your own mind and in your own heart and be your voice for that child.”

Speaking up for Bennett, gave DeLoach the confidence to speak up for herself, her family (including Bennett’s older brother Hudson, 11), as well as other people and initiatives she cares deeply about.

“What you’ll realize is if you could do it for your child, you can begin doing it for your community, for your country, for whatever is right,” she said. “And we can do it with kindness and compassion.”

DeLoach continues to advocate for Bennett, who is thriving but still requires monitoring, and she also uses her voice to speak up raise awareness and money for causes that matter to her, including children’s heart health.

“I see (Bennett) on a playground, and I know for most parents that’s a given, but that’s not a given for parents of children with congenital heart defects,” she told Us Weekly. “Get your child’s heart checked. … I hope by the time I take my last breath in this world that it will just be a part of the screening of every newborn.”

DeLoach’s advocacy work includes serving as president of the CHLA Foundation’s Board of Trustees, fundraising for the Alzheimer’s Association, and sitting on the board of Mind What Matters, a nonprofit devoting to supporting caregivers.

Nikki DeLoach Says Her Son Bennett’s Health Crisis Also Inspired Her to Advocate for Caregivers

DeLoach also learned through her son’s health crisis how much support caregivers need but rarely receive.

“My husband went to work every day, and it was just me (at home),” she told EntertainmentNow in December, noting that many parents struggle to juggle being caregivers to chronically ill children while also bringing in an income. “You know, some people have to quit their jobs. Some people have to go part time. They struggle with being able to get to their own doctor’s appointments, which is why we hear that sometimes caregivers go down before the actual person who is sick.”

That awareness, combined with witnessing her mom be a caregiver to her dad after being diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer’s, inspired DeLoach’s work with Mind What Matters, including co-hosting the nonprofit’s podcast with executive director Elizabeth Humphreys.

She told EntertainmentNow that it’s one of the reasons she’s so happy to be part of the Hallmark family, because she’s heard time and time again that the movies she’s in provide respite for caregivers.

“The load that they carry is so big and so heavy,” DeLoach said, “and so I understand why so many caregivers and first responders, nurses and firefighters … love Hallmark because, for 90 minutes, you get to disappear into a world where everything is going to be okay, where there is a happy ending. In real life, we don’t always feel that, and also we don’t always get that.”