12 Tips from Celebrities to Make You a Far Worse or Weirder Parent
“He literally crawls across the room to attack my mouth if I’m eating.” If that’s a behavior you want to encourage too, read on.
Shut Up
Scientology recommends a “silent birth,” where everyone in the room dare not speak a word or express an emotion lest it infiltrate the baby’s impressionable brain as it tumbles out of the womb.
Eat Up
Tom Cruise didn’t want Katie Holmes to hog all that placenta; he had plans to chow down too: “I’m gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious.”
Alicia Silverstone said she’d chew up a bunch of gross stuff and spit it into her kid’s mouth, to save him the trouble: “I fed Bear the mochi and a tiny bit of veggies from the soup from my mouth to his. It’s his favorite — and mine. He literally crawls across the room to attack my mouth if I’m eating.”
Make the Same Mistakes Your Parents Made
Cardi B said that her mom never let her go to sleepovers, and in response, she skipped school to explore her wild side: “My mom tried to stop me from all of that, but I still did it. I joined a gang. If she had let me out as often as I wanted to, I probably would be dead or got my face cut up.” Her plan is to enact the very same no-sleepovers rule. Maybe it’ll work better this time around!
TV Will Rot Your Brain! Movies Are Chill Though
Per Megan Fox, a three-hour movie is good for the brain, while three hours of TV is bad for the brain, because humans are famously born with an innate sense of media literacy: “With movies, I feel like there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s linear. There’s a clear story. I think that it’s different than just putting a kid in front of the television because it’s just nonstop. They’re just being bombarded with all of this sort of live media, and it’s very overwhelming.”
Naked Sundays
Christina Aguilera’s approach to normalizing the human body is to make sure her kid knows his mom is sexy and sexual: “I think it’s important that he sees mommy not be ashamed for her sexuality. I mean, he’s two. We’re art collectors, there are a lot of female nudes around the house. Max will be growing up in a house where it’s just the norm. It’s only weird when you shame it.” She’s established what she calls “Naked Sundays” in her household.
Cool It With the B-Word
Jason Momoa won’t let his kids watch his early work, from back before he became family-friendly. When asked about Baywatch, he said, “We don’t say the B-word at home! We hide all of that, mate! Never happened, mate!”
Wash Your Kid’s Mouth Out With Capsaicin
Actress Lisa Welchel recommends putting a little hot sauce on a kid’s tongue when they’re bad: “It does sting and the memory stays with them so that the next time they may actually have some self-control and stop before they lie or bite or something like that.”
Don’t Burden Yourself With Convenience
Kourtney Kardashian may be right to worry about microplastics, but the combination of a Kardashian, doing their own research, and then indiscriminately tossing an item that a normal person literally needs to survive motherhood makes this characteristically out-of-touch: “When I had Mason, I did a lot of health-related research and decided to get rid of my microwave.”
Confuse Your Kids Linguistically
Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s from LA but talks like she’s from Hogwarts, wouldn’t let her kid watch English-language cartoons: “Apple was cross as I only let them watch TV in French or Spanish. When I’m in France, I go to Boulevard Beaumarchais and buy all their cartoons.”
Turn Vacation Into a Bachelor’s Degree
Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves took their kids on a trip to Alves’ native Brazil. In preparation, McConaughey made them cram like they forgot to prepare for finals: “The kids are taking Portuguese classes for the last week. They already know a lot of Portuguese, but they’re taking Portuguese classes five hours a day for the last week in preparation for going on this trip.”
Only Drink Blessed Water
In 2008, a list of rules Madonna imposed on Guy Ritchie when he was visiting with their kids was leaked to the press. Some of them were perfectly reasonable — he couldn’t just pass them off to his parents while taking care of them, and he was responsible for organizing security to keep them safe. Other rules were harder to relate to — the kids can’t touch man-made fibers, and can only drink bottled water that was blessed by leaders of her mystical religion.