Fans have begun to worry that Kourtney Kardashian’s kids, who are now getting old enough to really understand the coverage of their mom’s behaviors in the media, might be picking up some bad habits.
Is there a way to maintain the public persona that has helped her build an influencer empire while still keeping her kids safe, or is the balance just too much?
Lately, Kardashian has found herself gracing the headlines for her feud with sisters Kim and Khloé Kardashian.
The long-running fight apparently stemmed from the other two sisters feeling as if Kourtney was not pulling her weight when it came to screen time on their shared reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
The fight has become reality TV fodder, and the sisters (or at least whoever edits and promotes the footage for their show) have decided to lean all the way into this rating-boosting battle. Kim and Kourtney actually got into a physical altercation in a recent episode of KUWTK, and it took two people to pull them apart.
Whether the fight was genuine or simply staged for the show, it’s clear that Kourtney Kardashian is struggling with her place on the reality show. She has announced she’ll be taking a big step back from the work.
Whether the physical fight with her sister was real or not, it was certainly plastered all over the internet for weeks leading up to the show’s airing and talked about even more. It’s almost certain that Kardashian’s own children have caught wind of the conversations surrounding their mother’s behavior.
She is likely considering how her public image is impacting what they think of her and how they manage their own behavior.
This is exacerbated by the fact that Kardashian has been criticized for struggling to provide discipline for her children in the past.
She has gotten into heated debates with fans about her no-spanking policy. While it’s always a lot easier to make parenting choices for kids who aren’t your own, fans have been highly critical of Kardashian’s parenting.
Even if the star is totally confident in her approach to motherhood, she has to feel extra pressure knowing how closely these critics are watching her kids’ behavior.
Recent fan conversations have shown that the criticism of Kardashian’s parenting techniques has not died down. In fact, fans in a Reddit thread brought up plenty of past transgressions as they roasted Kardashian for failing to teach her kids how to behave.
Commenters brought up the time her daughter Penelope scratched her nanny and when her son Mason started a fight at school. Now fans are connecting both of those incidents to Kardashian’s own physical fight with her sister: “well now we know why … Kourtney hasn’t even learned to keep her hands to herself and she’s 30 years older than Penelope.”
“Kourtney’s kids are undisciplined bc Kourtney has never once bothered to parent,” another commenter chimed in to agree with the assessment.
Fans started looking at other ways that Kardashian was failing as a parental role model. “[S]he’s leaning on her kids saying she can’t walk anymore, sitting on the ground, telling them she’s tired.
I get it, you’re jet lagged but what kind of example does that set for them? At a genocide memorial,” one fan wrote about Kardashian’s behavior during a trip to a memorial site.
While most of us would probably hate to have the full range of our choices displayed for the world to see and judge, Kardashian’s role as a reality TV star has left her especially vulnerable to this kind of critique.
Maybe she is wanting to step away from the pressure to set a better example for her children, or maybe she just wants to get out of fans’ glaring view so she can catch her breath as a mother.