Celeb Dad Matthew McConaughey’s Best Parenting Advice

In a 2020 interview with Town & Country, Matthew said it’s important not to just give your kids whatever they want. “Sometimes loving your kids means giving them just what they want. Other times it means tough love,” he explained, noting that he’s particularly conscious of this since his children are growing up in a privileged Hollywood family.

“Affluent people can give their kids everything they want, but they’re not usually going to get what they need. Loving a child is a lot harder if you really give a damn. ‘No’ takes a lot more energy. It’s a lot easier to say ‘yes.'”

To create “respect and trust within the household,” Matthew has three key rules that he enforces with his kids. “We do not allow lying in the house. You cannot say the words ‘I can’t,’ and you can’t use the word ‘hate.’ Those three [things] will get you in big trouble in our house. Lying, saying ‘I can’t,’ or saying ‘I hate,'” he shared during a 2020 interview with Oprah Winfrey for Apple TV+.

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Matthew encourages his children to be humble but also appreciate all that they have and not feel embarrassed by their privilege. He also doesn’t want to see them practicing false modesty. During his Oprah interview, he said he tells Vida, Levi, and Livingston, “If a kid at school ever says to you, ‘Oh, I bet you live in a big house because your dad’s famous,’ don’t bow your head. Look up and go, ‘Yeah, we do actually live in a nice house. My dad works really hard to be as good as he can at his job,’ which I do.”

While chatting with Mayim Bialik for a 2021 episode of her Breakdown podcast, Matthew reflected on his own childhood and how his mother and father used “fear-based” parenting. And though he said it helped “keep [him] in line” and allowed him to understand the consequences of his behavior, he is taking a gentler approach with his own kids.

“I’ve tried to evolve as a parent,” he told Mayim. “I don’t judge my parents or how they did it as right or wrong or ‘Oh, you can’t do it that way anymore.’ I’m trying to instill the same values my parents tried to instill in us, but I try to do it in different ways.”

Though Matthew and Camila are against physical punishment, they do believe in disciplining their children in other ways, such as taking away screen time or making them go to bed early.

“I’m a fan of discipline, I’m a fan of responsibility, and I’m a fan of consequences to prepare [my kids] for when they’re out of our house at 18. Because [in] the real world, you can do the same deed and it doesn’t just give you a demerit — you can end up in jail or worse,” he told USA Today in 2018.

“We are big on consequences,” he told Mayim, noting that can also include positive consequences for good behavior. “Consequences always get a bad rap as always being the bad. Consequences have an equal amount of being the good, the pleasure, as well.”

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While appearing on the Rich Roll podcast in 2020, Matthew shared that when his kids misbehave and need to be set straight, he and Camila avoid using that classic catch-all phrase of parents.

“We do not say, ‘Because I said so,’ as much as my parents did, or most of our parents did. We do try to explain things,” he said, adding that even though they might be tempted, he and Camila never let bad behavior slide.

“Not wanting to allow a wound to fester, we’ve got to gather up the energy and sit down with our son and go, ‘Do you understand why that’s not allowable?'”

Once his three kids had reached their tween years and were becoming “their own little people,” Matthew realized that he needs to parent them each according to the unique individuals they are rather than as a group. “You’ve got to go, ‘Wait, I’m gonna treat you fairly but I’m not gonna treat you all the same,'” he explained on Mayim’s podcast.

One aspect of his mother and father’s parenting style that Matthew has embraced is their emphasis on having good manners. “I like the manners and graces that my parents taught me — I like sirs and ma’ams and please and thank you,” he explained to Mayim. “It’s a great thing of respect. I even call my kids mister and missus just to get them in the lingo of going back and forth”

Matthew said it’s important to give your kids a voice and let them have a say in things. “We listen to more debates than my parents would’ve listened to,” he told Mayim, noting that he believes it gives his kids “more agency.”

Matthew believes it’s important to maintain healthy parent-child boundaries, as much as we want to be super close with our kids. “I know some dads who want to be best friends with their kids so bad. None of those kids turned out to be maybe what they could. It’s a disservice to your child,” he explained on the Today show in 2018.

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Matthew makes a conscious effort not to yell in front of his kids. And if he ever does begin to raise his voice, he will immediately give himself a little talking-to. “Alright, McConaughey, what did you not handle getting to this point that you had to raise your voice?”

For Matthew and Camila, that means always being in sync when it comes to disciplining their kids and enforcing the rules — there’s no strict parent and more permissive parent. “My wife and I have a similar moral bottom line. When kids try to good cop, bad cop ya, we’re on the same page. If they try to play us, we give the same answer,” Matthew explained on Today.

In 2020, Matthew shared with CNN host Anderson Cooper that he’s been surprised to discover that raising kids is “so much more DNA than environment.” Ultimately, they will develop into the people they’re going to be in spite of any little parenting missteps we make — so we should all cut ourselves some slack.

“They are who they are, and we nudge them along, and we shepherd them, and we try to put what they love in front of them and keep them away from great harm. But boy, they are who they are right when they come into the world,” he said.

At the end of the work- and school week in the McConaughey household, one big rule gets broken: curfew. And it’s all in the name of capturing those quality family bonding moments.

“Friday night’s the no-curfew night. It’s pizza night, it’s a movie night, it’s ‘all the kids can sleep with Mama and Papa night,'” said the Interstellar star. “That night can go late. Sometimes we have to lie about the time and say it’s midnight when it’s really 10 because we can tell it’s gonna go to 2.”