None of us really choose our families and while we do our best to navigate problems that might arise between us and our parents, things don’t always work out for the best and indeed there are examples all over the world of children who are estranged from their parents for one reason or another.
When it comes to celebrities, there are a million examples of annoyingly happy families that are shoved in our faces through overly positive posts all over social media. However, Hollywood is full of examples of celebs who have strained relationships with their parents, so we have decided to give you a list of some of the most dysfunctional Hollywood families and the reasons why some of our favorite celebs have terrible relationships with their parents.
Justin Bieber:
Due to the fact that the singer broke out into the international spotlight so early on in his life, his parents (particularly his mother) were involved in his early career, however, as he got more famous, he began to drift from his parents. In a 2015 Billboard cover story, Bieber revealed that his relationship with his mother was “non-existent” at the time, revealing that he took some distance from her after his bad behavior began to be the subject of much media attention. He explains that he was ashamed of his actions and didn’t want to confront his mother because he was afraid that she was disappointed in his newfound bad boy status.
After getting arrested for “drag-racing” while under the influence in 2015, Bieber’s sweet young songbird status began to change and subsequently so did his relationship with his mother. However, as Bieber began to get out of the shenanigans he was getting himself into, he began to patch things up with his mother and now they are on better terms. As for his father, who is a former carpenter and pro-am mixed martial artist, Bieber was estranged for him for most of his early life, but according to several sources Bieber has given his father a permanent place in his entourage in recent years.
Selena Gomez:
Gomez stole the world’s heart with her innocent smile and beautiful voice when she popped up on the Disney scene in the mid-2000s, but her mother was not as enchanted with the actress/singer as the rest of the world. Gomez and her mother, Mandy Teefey had an OK relationship earlier on in the singer’s career, with Teefey serving as her daughter’s manager until 2014. When Gomez decided to drop her mother as her manager in 2014, an irreparable rift began to develop between mother and daughter and when Gomez began to attend couples therapy with her then-boyfriend Justin Bieber, Teefey did not approve because she thought Bieber was bad news.
After repairing their relationship and serving as producers on the Netflix hit series “13 Reasons Why“ together, people thought the trouble was over, but that was not the case. In 2017, they unfollowed each other on Instagram and fans watched as their relationship devolved into more drama. A month after they unfollowed each other, Teefey publicly criticized her daughter’s decision to join the cast of the Woody Allen film “A Rainy Day in New York” because of past allegations by Allen’s adopted daughter that he had sexually assaulted her. When disapproving fans appealed to Teefey to stop her daughter from working with Allen, she replied by saying that “no one can make Selena do anything she doesn’t want to do.
” But it seems that since then, the pair have managed to fix at least some of their issues, since Teefey posted a loving post in 2018 in which she gushed over her daughter.
Ariel Winter:
We were introduced to Winter’s quippy nerdiness in the hit comedy series “Modern Family”, on which she starred as Alex, Claire’s over-achieving daughter. In 2012, the then 14-year-old Winter filed a restraining order against her mother Crystal Workman, accusing her of being physically and verbally abusive. After the restraining order came into effect, Winter’s older sister was granted temporary guardianship of her Winter.
The fight resulted in a long and drawn-out court case in which Ariel’s lawyer claimed that she was almost fired from “Modern Family” several times because of her mother’s “harassment and interference”. There were even stories that Workman would withhold food from Ariel until she got her way, which would prompt her co-stars to sneak her meals behind her mother’s back. Unlike the previous two entries on the list, mother and daughter have not patched things up and their relationship remains distant and rocky. Winter would become legally emancipated from her mother before she even turned 18 and during subsequent interviews she revealed some pretty disturbing parenting on her mother’s part including dressing her up to sexually appeal to those around her from a very young age and not letting her have any friends who are girls, because “girls are competition.
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Beyonce:
When someone has reached such heights of success as Queen Bey, it is certainly not easy to have relationships with anyone. Beyonce has been pretty vocal about her bad relationship with her father Mathew Knowles who also served as her manager from the start of her career in the late 90s to 2011 when Beyonce announced she was dropping him. Mathew Knowles was known for being pretty greedy with the money his daughter was earning through her music career. That coupled with the fact that he was a pretty bad husband to Bey’s mother Tina Knowles, making a habit out of leaving her and then coming back and then leaving.
In 2011, Tina divorced him for good after news broke that he had fathered an illegitimate child with Alexsandra Wright and would later father a child with TaQoya Branscomb in 2014. In 2013, neither Beyonce or her sister Solange attended their father’s wedding to Gena Avery. The sisters did attend their mother’s wedding in 2015, however, which spoke volumes about which side they were taking in the divorce. Then on Beyonce’s “Lemonade” album, she referenced a certain case of infidelity that many of her fans thought was about her husband Jay Z, but since the song was called “Daddy Lessons,” others speculated that the song was actually about her father’s behavior with her mother.
Then after years of silence, Mathew threw some pretty intense shade on Bey in 2018 when he said that she was only successful because she was light-skinned for a black performer.
Demi Lovato:
Lovato had been estranged from her father from 2007 until his battle with cancer ended with his death in 2013. In a 2009 interview, Lovato set some of her father’s false statements about their relationship saying that what her dad told tabloids about them having a “positive” relationship, they had was "not exactly how he made it out to be.
It didn't have the fairy tale ending that he portrayed." She explained. "The last time I talked to him was two years ago ... You try to have faith in somebody, even when you're the last person that believes in him. But when somebody lets you down after you've been the only one there for them, and so many times, you don't know what else to do," Lovato continued. Despite staying quiet about the details of their issues together, Lovato’s 2011 song “For the Love of a Daughter,” hinted that he might have an issue with alcoholism. Then in 2015, after the release of her album from that year “Confident,” Lovato revealed in a Youtube interview that her father was “abusive” throughout her life.
She also cited her dad's struggle with mental illness as part of the reason he couldn't care for his family the way he knew he should.
Adele:
The world wondered what the hell was going on when in her acceptance speech at the 2017 Grammys, the British singer explicitly said “I don't love my dad,” and instead chose to thank her longtime manager Jonathan Dickins, saying, “We've been together for 10 years, and I love you like you're my dad. I love you so, so much. I don't love my dad, that's the thing.
That doesn't mean a lot. I love you like I would love my dad." Her fans didn’t have to look far to uncover why the singer didn’t have the best relationship with her father as he did an interview with the Sun back in 2011 in which he admitted to having a severe alcohol problem when Adele was growing up which started when his own father (Adele’s grandfather) passed away in 1999. He reportedly became very distant after his father’s death and completely shut Adele out of his life, which had disastrous implications on their relationship. "And all the time I thought, 'How can I do this to Adele?' I knew she’d be missing her grandad just as much as I was because they had such a close bond.
She adored him. Yet all I could do was drink and I'm so, so ashamed of myself for that. I was in so much grief that I couldn't see past myself and how I was feeling,” he explains to the Sun.
The Kardashian Sisters:
It’s no secret that the Kardashian sisters have had long-standing issues with their stepmother Caitlyn Jenner. In 2017, Jenner published her autobiography titled “The Secrets of My Life,” in which she delved pretty deep into her stepchildren’s private lives, especially aspects of it that they would have rather kept private.
Jenner claims in her tell-all book that the Kardashians’ father Rob Kardashian (who famously defended O.J. Simpson during his high-profile murder trial in the 1990s when he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and her boyfriend) knew that Simpson was guilty but chose to defend him anyway, which aside from being really inflammatory seems a little unnecessary considering Rob is dead now. The sisters did not take kindly to that issue being opened again, especially in such a public manner and all three of them reacted accordingly. Caitlin was subsequently called a "liar" and "not a good person" by Kim Kardashian West.
But that wasn’t the only issue the Kardashians had with Jenner and even before her book came out, Khloe Kardashian while doing an interview with Howard Stern, revealed how she felt “betrayed” when she discovered that many people outside the family knew about Caitlyn’s sex transition before members of the family did. Caitlyn was publicly angry with Khloe for making those comments, which in turn angered Khloe further, leading to her saying "She can tell me to f*** off all she wants. I don't have a relationship with her. I'm done," during an episode from the 12th season of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
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Macaulay Culkin:
The world was introduced to him as the lovable and surprisingly resourceful Kevin McCallister in “Home Alone” but as usual the reality was much more complex and less rosey than the film would suggest. Apparently Culkin had a terrible relationship with his father, who along with his mother was also his manager during his heyday in the 1990s. When Culkin’s parents decided to divorce in 1995 after 20 years of marriage and seven kids between them, an ugly custody battle ensued between both parents, and they weren’t just fighting over their 7 children, more importantly, they were fighting over who would get to continue managing their famous son’s career.
Culkin’s mother accused his father of drunkenness and of several incidents of severe abuse towards her and the children. During a New York Magazine interview, Macaulay said his father controlled the family "by humiliation and physical abuse." Macaulay and his father have been estranged ever since the court case in the mid-1990s. In 2016, the father told the Daily Mail, "I don't consider [Macaulay] a son anymore."
Angelina Jolie:
This is probably one of the more famous examples of parent-child conflicts in Hollywood since not only does it involve Jolie but also her father Jon Voight, who is a pretty famous actor in his own right.
Voight skipped out on his family when Jolie was only a baby and their relationship has been really bad ever since. Despite both celebs remaining pretty quiet about their troubles for most of their time spent in the limelight, in 2002, Voight made comments to Access Hollywood accusing his daughter of having mental problems and of course she did not stay quiet, issuing a pretty controversial statement saying, "I don’t want to make public the reasons for my bad relationship with my father. I will only say that, like every child, [brother] Jamie and I would have loved to have had a warm and loving relationship with our dad.
After all these years, I have determined that it is not healthy for me to be around my father, especially now that I am responsible for my own child." Jolie actually legally dropped her father’s name from hers. However, their story does have somewhat of a happy ending, since as recently as 2017, the pair have been warming up to each other with Jolie saying, "Jon and I have gotten to know each other — through grandchildren now — [and] we're finding a new relationship.”
