The best parenting advice ever, courtesy of Pratt, Paltrow and Pitt

Happy mother's day, ya'll!

In honor of this day, we bring you the best and most notable parenting advice doled out by some very, very famous moms (and dads). In no particular order:

• Brad Pitt told me he uses his phone to film his kids having tantrums, and then, a day later, plays them back the clips -- to his kids' embarrassment/shame/horror/denial.


• Naomi Watts gave me this enduring bit of wisdom, which is now being used by many of my mom friends: when your kids flip out and fight over toys, put the object into "toy jail" for a week. It's brilliant. And brilliantly effective. (Never ask my son about the bow and arrow incident, which led directly to toy incarceration).


• Frequent flyer Amy Adams entertains her daughter by buying a slew of small presents, wrapping each individually, and parsing them out during the flight. Unwrapping each object keeps Aviana entertained. For hours.

Ben Affleck on how he tries to keep his three kids somewhat grounded:

"You don't want to beat your kids up with, 'Finish your fruit because there are people starving.' (Violet) came to visit me in Detroit. We saw some of the great beautiful stuff there and we saw a house where there was one inhabited home on the block. My daughter asked a lot of questions. I want her to see that and understand that it's not all wine and roses and that people are struggling."

Gwyneth Paltrow on how she gets Apple and Moses to eat healthy, a constant battle for most parents:

"On the weekends, I make a big thing of steamed brown rice to keep in the fridge. I make a big thing of my vegetarian chili. I make turkey meatballs. I stock the fridge with stuff we can eat. My daughter will come home from school and have a bowl of chili almost every day. It's difficult. As a mother you want them to eat good food. You don't want them to be hungry. It goes through phases. I do bowls of a lot of little things. My best tip for kid eating is what I call in the book a rice cream sundae. Have dips and little cubes of chicken and steamed peas. Say, you do it yourself. They're into it. Different sauces. Stuff where they're autonomous." (Spoiler alert: this works).

Chris Pratt on how he and wife Anna Faris avoided, to date, raising a picky eater:

"We read it in a book early on, to not restrict anything. I went around asking for one piece of parenting advice at the shower. One of the pieces of the advice was, they eat what you eat. If they don't eat it, they don't eat. He just eats it. I also read that in Bringing Up Bebe. He eats everything. I'm trying to think what he doesn't like -- spicy. Spicy is now our term for what adults have. If I have a beer and he asks to have some of that, I tell him it's too spicy."

Jeremy Renner on teaching his daughter Ava to articulate what she wants:

"I spoil her, but I make her work. 'You're hungry?' You need to learn to say you're hungry. I don't respond to 'eh eh eh.' She needs to earn things. Things didn't just come to me. I earned (my career). I really appreciate it. There's so much value in this entire experience for me."