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Buzz Feed
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Celebrity Parenting Controversies That Sparked Outrage
Jana Kramer is not a fan of giving her kids sunscreen. 'I don't use sunscreen on my kids unless it's going to be for hours outside because I know they don't burn," Jana said on a recent episode of the Whine Down podcast. "And there's so much bad stuff in sunscreen that if we're not going to be out there for more than a couple hours, listen, come at me. But I'm just not putting it on.' 'I will if we're on the beach for hours… Like, I'll put it on his neck, his ears — the baby — but the kids, I haven't put on any on them because I'm like, they're not getting burned. What's worse, the burn or the suntan lotion?' Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard would lock their then-3-year-old daughter in her room until she fell asleep, but it's not as harsh as it sounds. "[Delta] decided to stop sleeping about nine months ago," Kristen said in a 2018 interview with Parents, via Today's Parent. "And every night, when we put her to bed, she turns the lights on, which annoys the 4-year-old [Lincoln], and she will move furniture, and she bangs on the door with different, hard toys. We switched the doorknob. We turned the lock on the outside." "I'm sorry, I know that's controversial," she continued. "But we lock [the door] when she gets in there, and we stand outside and say, 'We love you, we will talk to you in the morning, but now, it's time for sleep.' Then, after about 10 minutes, she'll wind herself down. And then, before we go to bed, obviously, we unlock it." Alicia Silverstone preferred to bird-feed her son when he was younger — as in, she would pre-chew his food and then pass the food from her mouth to his. "I just had a delicious breakfast of miso soup, collards and radish steamed and drizzled with flax oil, cast iron mochi with nori wrapped outside, and some grated daikon," Alicia wrote in 2012 on her The Kind Life blog. "Yum! I fed Bear the mochi and a tiny bit of veggies from the soup…from my mouth to his." "It's his mine. He literally crawls across the room to attack my mouth if I'm eating. This video was taken about a month or 2 ago when he was a bit wobbly. Now he is grabbing my mouth to get the food!"The post was accompanied by a video of her performing the act. Nelly isn't interested in parenting his child with Ashanti until he's able to walk and talk. 'Well, listen," Nelly said during an episode of their new reality series Nelly & Ashanti: We Belong Together. "It's all you, I ain't even gon' lie. You know, I ain't got nothing for him.' Ashanti replied, 'Absolutely not, I know.' 'Until he can say 'I'm hungry,' until he can say, 'I need to use the bathroom,' it's gonna be a lot in your lap… As soon as he gets to walking and talking, he with the crew.'Nelly went on to joke about being able to sleep through their baby crying and fussing in the middle of the night, and later followed up with this comment: 'Baby, I'll give you the world… I just ain't changing no diaper." Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher don't belive in bathing their children everyday. During a 2021 episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis got into a discussion with hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman about their and their children's bathing how often they use soap. Dax theorized that people "should not be getting rid of the natural oil on your skin with a bar of soap every day.""I didn't have hot water growing up as a child, so I didn't shower much anyway," Mila said. "But when I had children, I also didn't wash them every day," Mila added. "I wasn't the parent that bathed my newborns — ever.""Now here's the thing," Ashton chimed in. "If you can see the dirt on them, clean them. Otherwise, there's no point." Ice-T and Coco Austin still push their daughter in a stroller. The famous couple received a lot of backlash for allowing her then-6-year-old daughter Chanel to sit in a stroller. Many people in the comments believed Chanel was too old to be pushed around by her parents. The family was vacationing in the Bahamas when Coco shared this photo."Why do they have a 6-year-old in a stroller?" someone asked. While another person commented, "SHE IS SO CUTE BUT LOOKS MISERABLE IN THAT STROLLER."Many news outlets picked up the story, including CNN, which got caught in the crossfire when Ice-T decided to respond: "Lol… CNN? Really?" the rapper tweeted in 2022. "MFs ain't got shit else to talk about.. F em all. Smh. Lol." Jamie Oliver made his kids eat chili peppers as a form of punishment. 'I give them chillies for punishment,' the popular TV chef said. 'It is not very popular beating kids anymore, it's not very fashionable, and you are not allowed to do it, and if you are a celebrity chef like me, it does not look very good in the paper. So you need a few options.' '[My daughter] Poppy was quite disrespectful and rude to me and she pushed her luck,' he continued. 'In my day I would have got a bit of a telling-off but you are not allowed to do that. She ran up to mum and said, 'This is peppery'. I was in the corner laughing. [Jools] said to me, 'Don't you ever do that again.'' Madonna made her daughter Lourdes wear the same outfit every single day, until she was obedient. Whenever her daughter left clothes on the floor, Madonna had an interesting method to prevent her from doing it again. "We take all of her clothes and put them in a bag, and she has to earn all of her clothes back by being tidy," she told USA Today in 2005. She wears the same outfit every day to school until she learns her lesson." Lourdes once described her icon of a mother as a "control freak" in Interview magazine in 2021."The list of things I wasn't allowed to do is never-ending. My mom is such a control freak, and she has controlled me my whole life. I needed to be completely independent from her as soon as I graduated high school." Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder isolated themselves and their newborn daughter from the world for the first 30 days of their child's life. 'After the baby arrives, we're doing one month of silence," Nikki said in 2017. "Just the three of us, no visitors, and we're turning off our phones too, so there's no expectation for us to communicate.' She added that she didn't want to feel the pressure of having to give multiple people updates about the baby and share photos of the baby. 'You don't get those first 30 days back, and we want to be fully present." Did you grow up in a household with interesting or controversial parenting methods that might seem uncommon to others? Share it with me below!
Hamilton Spectator
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Novelist Lindsay Zier-Vogel on her love of middle grade fiction and dislike of Hemingway
Amy feels that she has lost her creative identity to motherhood. Though she loves her daughter Alice and her husband Max, a math professor studying 'geometric topology' and quantum field theory, she cannot help but feel that her career as a musician has been permanently sidelined. Lindsay Zier-Vogel's new novel 'The Fun Times Brigade' (Book*hug Press) is as much about the joy and struggle of musical collaboration as the way that motherhood can eclipse everything else a person has ever been. 'The Fun Times Brigade,' by Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Book*hug Press, 352 pages, $24.95. 'She used to be able to sit down and churn out lyrics,' the narrator writes, 'whipping out a song in an hour, sometimes less, but now she's stuck bouncing and swaying in her backyard, unable to even walk down to Bloor to get herself a coffee. She doesn't know who she is without a guitar in her hands. She doesn't know who she is without an audience waiting for an encore.' Zier-Vogel has written the novel in alternating chapters that skip across swaths of time, with Amy's life as a children's TV entertainer and touring musician carefully joined with the realities of diaper changes, playdates and late-night internet searches about infant socialization. When a marital indiscretion puts her relationship at risk, Amy is forced to consider the actual cost of living in the past when a promising future beckons. Toronto-based Zier-Vogel's books include 'Letters to Amelia' and 'Dear Street.' Her work has also appeared in Chatelaine, Today's Parent, the Globe and Mail and the Temz Review. What did you last read and what made you read it? I just finished 'Moon Road' and am still reeling. Sarah Leipciger's conversations between old partners on a road trip to find answers about their daughter's disappearance were irreverent and heartbreaking and pitch perfect. Lindsay Zier-Vogel calls some of the writing in 'Moon Road' 'irreverent and heartbreaking and pitch perfect.' I'm in a book club that is less book club and more a bunch of writers, publishers and librarians who sit around and talk about books we love, and I got the recommendation from our group chat. I'll read anything they suggest. What book would your readers be shocked to find in your collection? I read a lot of middle grade fiction these days. It began as I started reading what my kids were reading, but I've fallen in love with middle grade books — to the point where I've started writing one myself. My favourite recent middle grade books include 'My Life as a Diamond' (Jenny Manzer), 'Fast Pitch' (Nic Stone), 'Living With Viola' (Rosena Fung), 'Asking for a Friend' (Ronnie Riley) and 'The Firefly Summer' (Morgan Matson). When was the last time you devoured a book in one, or very few, sittings? One of my very greatest pleasures is gulping down books in a single sitting. It's not always possible, but I recently had a weekend that was filled with kid activities and birthday parties I didn't have to attend, and I devoured Teri Vlassopoulos' 'Living Expenses.' We're in a writing group together, so I'd read parts of the book in their infancy, and it was such a revelation to read the completed book, and even more glorious to read it all in one gulp. Lindsay Zier-Vogel read 'Living Expenses' in one big gulp. Who's the one author or what's the one book you'll never understand, despite the praise? Hemingway. I tried in grad school, but I could never get into his work. I would've rather read Chaucer a thousand times over. What's the one book that has not garnered the success that it deserves? I really loved 'The Second Season,' by Emily Adrian, and I don't think it got its due in Canada. In it, a former college basketball player turned sports commentator is gunning for the job that will allow her to be the first woman to call an NBA game on national television, and it fills my ideal Venn diagram of basketball and motherhood and ambition, with a side of sports injuries. Adrian's rendering of basketball players is so convincing that at one point, I looked one of them up to check their stats. 'The Second Season,' Lindsay Zier-Vogel says, hasn't gotten its due in Canada. What book would you give anything to read again for the first time? Last summer, I gulped down Xochitl Gonzalez's 'Anita de Monte Laughs Last' in a single day, and though I loved every single page, after I finished it, I wished I'd read it over a few weeks instead and savoured it. The book is such an incredible exploration of privilege and power, asking whose voices matter and who gets to decide whose artistic legacy lives on. I might have to read it again this summer. When you were 10 years old, what was your favourite book? I was either reading 'Anne of Green Gables' for the billionth time, wishing I too could float down a river in a leaky rowboat, or anything by Jean Little: 'Mama's Going to Buy You a Mockingbird,' 'Mine for Keeps,' 'Hey World, Here I Am!' When I was in Grade 3, I wrote a fan letter to Jean Little and asked her if she could come to my school, and in Grade 4, she did! I got to introduce her and her guide dog to the entire school, and it was the moment I knew I wanted to become a writer. What fictional character would you like to be friends with? I wish Rocky, from Catherine Newman's 'Sandwich,' was real. She'd be like my big sister, and we'd sit around and talk about perimenopause and the impossible juggling act of caring for aging parents and parenting young adults. She'd be irreverent and make me laugh and I'd leave with a list of podcasts to listen to, feeling lighter and less alone. Lindsay Zier-Vogel would like to be friends with Rocky, from Catherine Newman's 'Sandwich.' Do you have a comfort read that you revisit? My comfort fictional read is 'Tom Lake' by Ann Patchett. It's a perfectly plotted book, and I will never tire of the conversations her characters have under those cherry trees, or the shenanigans the actors get up to at the summer theatre. My comfort non-fiction book is 'Swimming Studies' by Leanne Shapton. The illustrated swimming pools and her descriptions of being in the water are transportive. What was the last book that made you laugh or cry? 'Leap,' by Simina Popescu — a coming-of-age graphic novel about two teenage dancers at a performing arts school in Romania. I used to dance, and I haven't read a book that truly captures the day-to-day realities, power dynamics, dance friendships and physicality of dance training the way this one does. What is the one book you wish you had written? Though I generally don't read — or write — mysteries, I wish I'd written 'The Amelia Six,' a middle-grade mystery by Kristin L. Gray. It is set in the present day, and a bunch of preteen Earhart fans win the chance to sleep over at her house turned museum. Of course, things go sideways and Amelia's famous goggles go missing, and the girls have to team up and find the culprit. It's truly one of the most perfect books about Amelia Earhart I've ever read — and I read all of them. Lindsay Zier-Vogel wishes she had written the kids' mystery 'The Amelia Six.' What three authors living or dead would you like to have a coffee with? I've been working with andrea bennett editing a collection of essays on swimming, and what I'd give to meet her in person rather than over Zoom or in the notes section of a Google doc. I've also been editing brilliant essays by Adrienne Gruber and Jessica J. Lee for this collection and I so wish we could meet to chat about writing and parenting. And after coffee, we'd all go swimming. What does your definition of personal literary success look like? My definition of literary success is having more time to write. I've recently been able to take Thursdays off client work — when I'm not writing books, I work as a grant writer — and it has been truly transformational for my writing process. I'd also love to publish more picture books because I love doing author visits at schools and libraries.
