The Kardashians' Biggest Parenting Confessions
For the Kardashians, the Venn diagram of family and business is a single circle, so we've learned a lot about how the stars of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" parent since their first show debuted in 2007. In the E! series' infancy, fans watched Kris Jenner and Caitlyn Jenner wrangle four young adults and two tweens whose needs often weren't those of the average viewer. When Kim Kardashian posed for Playboy in 2007, her meddlesome momager tried to provide her with moral support, blessing us with that iconic "You're doing amazing, sweetie!" meme. Kim later confessed to Harper's Bazaar that Kris pressured her to do the photoshoot by telling her, "They might never ask you again. Our show isn't on the air yet. No one knows who you are."
As Kris' kids became parents themselves, they had to decide just how much of that part of their lives they wanted to share. We soon learned that it was plenty — "The Kardashians" cameras even captured the moment Kim told her daughter North West about the night her conception took place. Such oversharing is a regular occurrence among her family members, so Kim seems less concerned about mentally scarring her kids with info like that than she is about spoiling them. "I worry about giving my kids too much. We don't do gifts. They have to really earn it," she wrote in a 2020 WealthSimple essay. This parenting konfession is just one of many the Kar-Jenners have made over the years.
Khloe Kardashian struggled to bond with her baby boy
When Khloé Kardashian welcomed her second child, a son she named Tatum, the circumstances surrounding his birth were far from ideal. Kardashian had already started the surrogacy process with her unfaithful on-again, off-again beau Tristan Thompson when she learned that the NBA player had fathered a baby with another woman. This was the final nail in the coffin for their relationship, but Kardashian decided to grant Thompson's request to be present when their surrogate gave birth. "I just figured why not let him come. I'll never get this moment back," she said on "The Kardashians." This was just the beginning of her distressing surrogacy experience.
On her family's Hulu reality series, Kardashian later got brutally honest about her struggle to bond with Tatum the same way she did with her daughter, True Thompson, after leaving the hospital with her new baby. "The connection ... took days with True. With him, it's taking months and we still don't have a complete bond," she confessed.
Kardashian believed that using a surrogate was the likely cause of her difficulty, as she found the entire process somewhat unsettling — especially how it ends. "I felt really guilty that this woman just had my baby and I take the baby and go to another room and you are separated. It felt like such a transactional experience," she said. "I wish someone was honest about surrogacy and the difference of it."
Kim Kardashian cried over her co-parenting struggles
In May 2023, Kim Kardashian opened up about how hard it is parenting the four children she and her ex-husband Kanye West share: North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm. When the kids start fighting, it's especially overwhelming. "There are nights I cry myself to sleep," she revealed on "On Purpose With Jay Shetty."
Her ex's social media behavior has further heightened Kardashian's stress levels. In one Instagram post, he shared a shady text he sent to Kardashian about their kids that read in part, "They will not do Playboy and sex tapes" (via BuzzFeed News). Ye also relentlessly attacked Pete Davidson while Kardashian was dating the comedian, and he turned the music video for his song "Eazy," into a dark, twisted fantasy: a claymation version of Ye buries Davidson alive. When Kardashian begged the rapper to stop using social media to air his grievances, he shared those texts with his followers.
In a December 2022 appearance on "Angie Martinez IRL," Kardashian revealed that she tries to protect her kids from learning about their father's bad behavior, which means that she never discusses it with them. "That's real heavy, heavy grown-up s*** that they're not ready to deal with," the emotional mom explained. She even sings along with them when they want to blast their father's songs in the car on the way to school. ("Eazy" presumably isn't on their playlist). "As soon as I drop them off, I can have a good cry," Kardashian said.
Saint saw an ad referencing his mom's sex tape
Cameras captured the moment Kim Kardashian called Kanye West to tearfully tell him that their son, Saint West, had seen a fake ad teasing a new Kardashian sex tape. "He started laughing and was like, 'Mommy, look,' and it was a picture of my cry face. I almost died when Saint thought it was funny,'" she recalled to Ye on "The Kardashians" premiere. Saint had been playing the game Roblox when he saw the ad, which he was, thankfully, unable to read at the time.
While Ye shared some words of assurance with his then-wife, Kardashian's real sex tape would later come up on "The Kardashians." In an episode filmed after their divorce, she complained about Ye trying to paint her as a bad parent for her past error in judgment. After all, it wasn't like she expressed her admiration for Nazis to Alex Jones on InfoWars. "All of [Ye's] shenanigans — I don't even know what the f*** to call it — is going to be far more damaging to the kids one day than my tape will ever be," she said.
When she appeared on "Watch What Happens Live" in 2019, Kardashian admitted that she hadn't yet figured out exactly what she would say to her kids about her sex tape if they ever asked about it. "I think I'm just gonna be super honest and real with them," she stated.
Kourtney Kardashian is a co-sleeping advocate
Kourtney Kardashian sparked the kind of online debate that mommy-shamers and experts love to weigh in on when she revealed that she strongly supports co-sleeping. "I realize that people have many different ways for getting their kids to sleep through the night ... In my house, I found that a co-sleeping strategy worked best," she wrote on her Poosh blog. Kardashian's original plan was to coax her and Scott Disick's first child, Mason Disick, into staying in his own room when he got older, but her efforts to do so proved futile. "I eventually embraced a family bed," she revealed.
Mason decided he was totally over sleeping with his parents at age seven, while his younger sister, Penelope Disick, was still snuggling up with her mom at age 10. "She's slept with me every day since she was born, and pretty much still does, unless she has a friend sleep over," Kardashian said in a 2022 appearance on the "Not Skinny But Not Fat" podcast. Kardashian and her husband, Travis Barker, weren't living together at the time, so this made it easier for Kardashian to keep up the practice.
As for her third child, Reign, Kardashian wrote on her blog, "I decided to have him sleep in his own room from the start." She'd find herself having to make a fourth co-sleeping decision in 2023 when she got pregnant with Barker's baby and announced the news in a way that was no small thing.
Fast food fries are forbidden in Kourtney's household
Kourtney Kardashian told Harper's Bazaar that what she loves most about being a mom is having an excuse to let loose her inner child. "You relive your own childhood — going to Disneyland and watching all the movies I watched when I was a kid," she said. But while she enjoys introducing her children to some of the things that brought her joy as a child, they do not include a specific junk food many adults have fond childhood memories of. "Today I was having my one-on-one time with my son and he said, 'Mom, I need McDonald's french fries today, please. It's been a year since I've had it,'" she recalled to The Wall Street Journal. "I was like, 'Today's not the day, sorry.'"
Kourtney later told Vogue that she does allow her kids to eat fries, but they usually stick to those of the homemade variety. "I love to avoid fast food when we can," she said. In a post on her app, Kourtney revealed that this isn't her kids' only dietary restriction, admitting that they had a hard time adjusting when she decided that everyone in her household was going to stop eating gluten and dairy (via People). Candy that contains artificial coloring is also a no-no. Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian told Haute Living that she tried to bribe her daughter North West to be on her best behavior during a Fendi photoshoot by giving her gummy bears.
Kim caved to Ye over North's cosmetics usage
Before she was even two years old, North West was experimenting with makeup. "She can open my blush, put the brush in, and put it on her cheek," Kim Kardashian told People (via OK!) in 2015. "Today, she was opening my lipstick. She puts it up to her lips like she knows what she's doing!"
North is growing up around a mom and aunties who don't just wear makeup regularly but have launched their own beauty brands, so it's not surprising that she became curious about cosmetics at a young age. Kardashian later shared some Instagram photos of her daughter rocking bold beauty looks, including the red lip she sported on Christmas in 2018 and the neon pink eyeliner she wore for a photo shoot in 2019. But a few months after Kardashian snapped the latter pic, she told E! that North's father had decided that he didn't want her wearing makeup anymore.
Kardashian said of Kanye West's beautifying ban, "He changed all the rules." She revealed that North wasn't even allowed to use the lip kits that had been gifted to her by Kylie Jenner. Apparently, Kardashian was breaking the rules just by allowing North to accept them from her aunt. So, Ye didn't just have an issue with North wearing makeup outside of the home; he didn't want her using it at all. "I kind of got in trouble for that," Kardashian said. "So, it's now no more makeup."
Kourtney Kardashian likes to smell Reign's old hair
There was a period of time when Kourtney Kardashian got brutally mommy-shamed simply for allowing her and Scott Disick's youngest son, Reign Disick, to let his hair grow out. In the comments section of a 2020 Easter post, one of her Instagram followers demanded that she cut the little boy's hair, and Kourtney shot back, "Most gorgeous hair on earth anyone who says otherwise ABCDEFG" (via Cosmopolitan). But a few months later, Reign decided to part with his long locks. Kourtney posted a photo of her son sporting a buzz cut and captioned it, "I am not ok."
While Reign was ready to let go of his famous mane, his mother was not. When she and Khloé Kardashian interrogated each other for a 2022 Interview magazine feature, Kourtney was pressed to reveal the contents of her "secret drawer" in her bedroom. "I have Reign's hair, because we didn't cut his hair until he was five. So I have his long braid and I smell it often," she confessed.
After Reign had his first haircut experience, he didn't shun the shears and started trying to regrow another sentimental memento for his mom to sniff. Instead, Kourtney allowed him to experiment with different hairstyles. In 2022, she shared a pic on Instagram of Reign rocking a mohawk that was similar to Travis Barker's old signature hairstyle, and the following year, the little hair daredevil had his hair cropped short and dyed blond.
How North West insults her mom
There are a lot of things Kim Kardashian's kids could roast her over, including her obsession with her appearance. (We wonder if they know that she told The New York Times she would feast on feces if it turned back the clock?) But North West has decided to take aim at her mom's taste whenever she wants to insult her. "Every time I get into some kind of disagreement with my daughter North, she thinks this is a dig to me, and she'll say, 'Your house is so ugly. It's all white. Who lives like this?'" Kardashian said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in 2021. "She just thinks it like gets to me. And it is kinda mean."
The mom devised a rule meant to keep her kids from making colorful DIY improvements to the pristine space. On her blog (via The U.S. Sun), Kardashian revealed that they are only allowed to color in their playroom but can do so to their hearts' content. "By the time they're done there, they have no desire to take a pen to our white furniture, lol!" she wrote.
North has also criticized her mom's colorless wardrobe. In 2022, Kardashian told Vogue that her daughter believes she wears black far too often, so North was thrilled to see her parent rocking what appeared to be an all-pink outfit on Valentine's Day. "She opened my coat, saw the black lining, and says 'Mom, you're still wearing black,'" Kardashian recalled.
Kylie Jenner's postpartum struggles
Those precious first weeks spent bonding with her newborns weren't all sunshine and rainbows for Kylie Jenner. She became a first-time mom when she and Travis Scott welcomed their daughter, Stormi Webster, in 2018. Like many new mothers, Jenner didn't feel great about the state of her body after giving birth. "I'm just feeling a little insecure," she told Kim Kardashian in an episode of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." "I feel like my hips have just spread. My favorite jeans, they're never going to fit me again." Luckily, her older sis was able to cheer up with a pep talk. Kardashian also spilled one of her postpartum style secrets: doubling up on the Spanx.
After she gave birth to her son, Aire Webster, in 2022, Jenner also wasn't feeling that new-baby bliss that some mothers experience. "It's been really hard for me. I should be really happy right now. I just had this new baby, but I cried nonstop for, like, three weeks," she said on "The Kardashians." Thankfully, she revealed that the tears eventually subsided, and she was able to celebrate her postpartum body the second time around. "I see my body and I love my body, my saggy t**s," she said.
Jenner's older sister has also shared some real talk about motherhood. "Pregnancy is the worst experience of my life!" Kardashian wrote on her app (via Access). "I don't enjoy one moment of it."
Kim Kardashian got parenting advice from her nephew
In 2020, Mason Disick sneakily created his own Instagram account and went live, much to the delight of fans who were eager to see if they could get the then-10-year-old to spill some tea about his famous family. But his career as a social media influencer was short-lived; Kourtney Kardashian filmed her own Instagram Live explaining that neither she nor Scott Disick had given Mason permission to create the account, per People. Mason's cousin, North West, did something similar when she was eight years old. After North went live on the TikTok account that she and her mom share, Mason decided to reach out to Kim Kardashian to give her some sage parenting advice.
In a post on her Instagram Stories, Kardashian shared a screenshot of a text from Mason that read in part, "Hi I don't wanna disrespect North but I don't think she should do the lives unless someone is with her because people are always screen recording and she might tell information that isn't correct and stuff like that, that she will regret" (via BuzzFeed News). Mason confessed to having his own regrets over his past social media behavior, and Kardashian asked him if he would share his feelings about the matter with his cousin. He sweetly obliged.
On the "Goop" podcast, Kardashian said that Kanye West wasn't happy about their daughter being on TikTok at all but revealed that she restricts North's usage of the app.
Kim and Kylie's baby name regrets
For the Kar-Jenners, generating countless headlines by keeping fans in suspense over what they've decided to name their children has become a family tradition. But for as much thought as the stars of "The Kardashians" put into their baby names, they sometimes end up regretting their choices. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West named their youngest daughter Chicago West after the city where Ye grew up, but Kardashian later decided that the nickname "Chi" sounded better. "Chicago just looks really long to me and doesn't flow," she said in a video on her website (via Metro). Kardashian also revealed that she went against Ye's wishes when she gave Chicago the same middle name as her, Noel.
Kylie Jenner similarly had a tough time picking out a moniker for her son Aire Webster, who she originally named Wolf. In an episode of "The Kardashians," she revealed that she and Travis Scott decided to wait until they met him for the first time to give him a name. "We thought it was going to come to us when we saw him and it didn't," she confessed. Wolf was a name that Khloé Kardashian had come up with, and Jenner just decided to settle for it at the time.
When Khloé chose the name Tatum for her own son, she made a big confession about it on "The Jennifer Hudson Show" — she was keeping it a secret for the season premiere of "The Kardashians."
Their comments on raising biracial children
Many of the youngest members of the Kar-Jenner fam have Black fathers, and their moms have spoken about the unique challenges they face when it comes to talking to their kids about race. In 2013, Kim Kardashian told BET (via USA Today) that she sought advice from other mothers of biracial children. "I think that the most important thing is how I would want to raise my children is to just not see color," she added. But you can't control the views of everyone your children will encounter in life. After white police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, a Black man, Kylie Jenner expressed concern about America's deep-rooted problem with racism. "I fear for my daughter and I hope for a better future for her," she wrote in a 2020 Instagram post.
Khloé Kardashian also acknowledged that her kids are growing up in a society where many people judge others by the color of their skin. "You're only setting them up, I think, for failure if you don't talk about race and probably the things that they're going to endure once they're in, quote, the 'real world,'" she said on the "Role Model" podcast in 2021. As for Rob Kardashian, in a 2017 episode of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," Khloé tried to get him to acknowledge that he and Blac Chyna were having a biracial baby. "It's gonna be an Armenian baby," he insisted. "Let's not make this a race war." Yikes.
Kylie Jenner doesn't want her daughter to emulate her
Kylie Jenner has some regrets about the image she used to put out there. In the trailer for Season 3 of "The Kardashians," she said to her sisters, "All of us just need to have a bigger conversation about the beauty standards that we're setting."
Jenner's moment of self-reflection about how her behavior impacts the self-esteem of others was apparently inspired by her daughter, Stormi Webster. "I don't want my daughter to do the things I did," Jenner said. "I wish I never touched anything to begin with." However, after Jenner got lip injections, she used her plumped-up pout to promote her lucrative lip kits. This helped the beauty mogul build a business empire, and she apparently doesn't mind being the poster child for her favorite beauty enhancement. "I got lip filler, and it was the best thing I've ever done. I don't regret it," she told HommeGirls. From the sounds of it, Jenner doesn't think her daughter will ever feel the need to get her lips done. "She has the most perfect lips in the whole entire world," the proud mom boasted in a YouTube Q&A.
Jenner isn't the only member of her family concerned about how her vanity will affect her kids. While discussing her obsession with sexy selfies and her pursuit of a law degree on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Kim Kardashian said, "I never want to be that embarrassing mom, or that embarrassing attorney, in no clothes."
Khloe won't let True stay at Kourtney's house
While administering the Vanity Fair lie detector test to Khloé Kardashian in 2022, Kourtney Kardashian asked her younger sibling a question that presented Kardashian fans with an intriguing mystery. Kourtney wanted to know if Khloé would ever allow her daughter, True Thompson, to stay the night at Kourtney's house, and Khloé truthfully stated that she would not. When Kourtney asked her why, Khloé replied, "I don't think we have enough time on this show for what the reason is."
Apparently, the reason has nothing to do with the amount of PDA between Kourtney and Travis Barker that True would potentially witness, which is something Kourtney's own kids have complained about on "The Kardashians." The topic of True having a sleepover with her cousins came up again during the sisters' joint Interview magazine interview, and Khloé said, "True is too young to sleep over. And she doesn't want to. She likes her space and I don't want her to get corrupted. Kids are older, and I'm like, 'No, we're good.'" In Khloé's defense, she would have to worry about Mason Disick teaching his little cuz how to go live on Instagram.
Khloé may also dislike the idea of True being exposed to a different style of parenting. "I'm very militant with how I parent True and I believe that a schedule saves everything, and not all of my siblings are the same," she said on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show."
Kim Kardashian believes Psalm is her dad reincarnated
In what may be the most bizarre Kardashian parenting confession, Kim Kardashian believes a medium's claim that her father, Robert Kardashian Sr., was reincarnated as her youngest son, Psalm West. She consulted the medium during a family vacay in Bali, a moment that was featured on a 2019 episode of "Keeping Up With the Kardashians." What the medium didn't know was that the prophesied son would soon enter the realm of the living. "No one on my crew knew that I had a surrogate that was pregnant with a boy," Kardashian told E! In 2020.
According to Kardashian, she and her family members have embraced the eerie belief that the soul of Rob Sr. may be residing inside Psalm because the medium isn't the only one who has said this — Psalm's nanny has heard similar prophecies. "Multiple people that had no idea that was my nanny or anything have come up to my baby to say that he's a family member reincarnated," she said. Kardashian also revealed that Psalm is left-handed, just like her late dad. And the second coming of her father apparently decided to be a breeze to parent, as Kardashian described Psalm as a "happy" baby.
Now, Kardashian just has to wait for Psalm to grow up and become a high-powered attorney like his grandfather so that they can put that reincarnation to use and form their own family law firm: Keeping Up With the Criminal Code.