HOLLYWOOD star Kristen Bell is known for her hot takes on parenting, and even has her own ‘Momsplaining’ YouTube channel.
She and husband Dax Shepard, parents to daughters Lincoln, 9, and Delta, 8, are honest and open about how they rear their children, sometimes leading to controversial debates on social media.
Shepard has made no bones about his substance abuse past, and now his struggles with sobriety.
Which brings us to the latest controversy the couple find themselves embroiled in. Appearing on the ‘Kelly Clarkson Show,' Bell revealed that they let their daughters drink non-alcoholic beer.
Admitting that it sounds “insane,” she gave some context and said because Shepard was a recovering addict, he drank non-alcoholic beer.
“So he'd pop one open, he'd have [our oldest daughter] on his chest, and we'd walk and look at the sunset,“ she added, speaking about the family’s evening walks.
"As a baby she was pawing at it, and sometimes she'd suck on the rim of it. So I think it feels to her like something special, something daddy, something family,“ Bell explained.
She added that the “drinks contained zero alcohol, and the children still sometimes request non-alcoholic beer when they're out for meals”.
But had the ‘Bad Moms’ star done her research, she would have thought twice before handing over a bottle of non-alcohol beer to her kid.
Citing advice from paediatricians, Insider noted that even if a beer has zero alcohol, it isn’ always the case. Some non-alcoholic beers have trace amounts of less than 0.05% alcohol.
Backing up the warning was Dr Chloe Campbell, a paediatrician at Salem Hospital, Massachusetts.
"We plant the seed in young minds that beer drinking is okay, it may lead to beer drinking at a young age. Maybe a kid will say, 'let me try Mommy's beer when parents are out of sight,'" Campbell told Insider.
The doctor also warned that it was easy for children to mistake alcoholic beer for the non-alcohol version which “can lead to dangerous consequences.”
Back in South Africa, even popular cider brand Savanna, shared on social media that Savanna Non-Alcoholic Lemon was not for sale to anyone under the age of 18, when the drink was launched.
"The controversy around whether youngsters should be consuming non-alcoholic drinks is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger problem and one that needs to be addressed with great urgency in our country,“ said educational psychologist Mandy Arnott during an interview with IOL Lifestyle.
Taking into consideration the history of alcohol abuse in the country, Arnott added that the drinking of non-alcoholic drinkswais seen as a substitute and precursor for the consumption of alcohol at a later stage.