Peter Andre has opened up about his parenting epiphany he had after hearing his daughter Princess chat with her brother.
The singer, who was raised in a Jehovah’s witness household, came to the realisation that being too strict would likely backfire.
Speaking on the Netmum’s podcast, he said: “I didn’t want my kids to be restricted. I learnt that lessons from my daughter, with Princess when Love Island was on and she was 14. I was like: ‘You’re not watching that.’
“And she’s like: ‘But why dad, all my friends have.’ I said: ‘I don’t care, that’s their parents’ choice.'”
However, Peter later discovered that his 14-year-old daughter had found a way to watch the racy dating show behind his back.
He explained: “This was when it first started, when it first came out. And then one day I was in the other room and I heard her talking to Junior going: ‘Yeah, I saw Love Island today at school.’
“And I heard and I was like: ‘What? ‘ And she was like: ‘Yeah, we watched it on my friend’s phone at lunchtime. And at that time, the penny dropped.”
After being brought up with religion and restrictive practices, the Mysterious Girl singer knows all too well the importance of balance in giving freedom to his children.
Jehovah’s Witnesses follow strict guidelines forbidding premarital sex, drugs, alcohol, smoking, gambling, and receiving blood transfusions.
Peter, who shares Princess and 19-year-old Junior with ex-wife, Katie Price, also has three kids Amelia, 11, Theo, 8, and nine-month-old Arabella with his wife Emily.
The father-of-five has revealed that both he and Emily feel their family is now complete and don’t have plans to have any more children.
Speaking on the podcast, he said: “What’s more important is that she (Emily) says she’s done. The thing is, as a guy, and I can only speak about myself here, when she says: ‘Shall we try for a baby’.
“Sometimes us guys are not thinking with the right brain. We’re thinking: ‘Oh, trying for a baby could be fun.’ If she said she’s not done, I would try so hard to avoid this happening again, because we’ve got enough children. I mean, how many do we want?”
Peter recently opened up about his parent’s ill health as his mum continues to battle Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. His elderly parents, Thea, 89, and dad Savvas, 92, live in Australia.
He wrote in OK!: “The only thing is my parents – I would give everything else up 100 fold just to have them in full health and back to their youth, but, unfortunately, life isn’t like that.”
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