Celebrity Parenting Controversies That Sparked Outrage

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11-07-2025

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 favorite...and 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 habits...and 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!