Lea Salonga talks about her parenting style now that her daughter is a teenager

Lea Salonga definitely feels wonderful that she's now part of the Ariel family.

The Miss Saigon actress recalls, "It's a detergent that I first discovered in the UK when I moved over there to start work on Miss Saigon. "

She continues, "So my mom and I we were headed to the grocery and then we looked at that. What's that?! What's Ariel? Like I picked up the box, like I guess it's detergent."

"So it became one of those products that we started using, so we've, so it's interesting now that I'm actually endorsing something that I encountered in a grocery store like 30 years ago, very interesting," Lea quips

Reminiscing her mom

What made it interesting for Coach Lea of The Voice Kids, the concept of Ariel made her reminisce about her and her mom, most especially her mom's attachment with her clothes when Lea Salonga was younger.

She shares, "Normally you know, like think about it, you know, there are clothes that we just have a strong attachment to and my mom is such a packrat."

Coach Lea adds, "So there's stuff that, 'oh this is your baptismal gown' or 'oh this is the shirt you wore when you did this.'"

"She has my communion dress, she has my graduation dress, she has at least two of my ballet tutus," she reminisces.

"So it's so, there's a very strong attachment to certain parts of your life and associating that with certain articles of clothing," she notes.

"Less of a packrat"

The Broadway singer Lea Salonga believes that she's not like her mom when it comes to her daughter.

She says, "With my daughter I'm less of a packrat. I try to get rid of things."

The Voice Kids coach continues, "Ahm, so I tend to, if it's something like very special like the gowns that she's wearing on concerts—those are the things like I really have to keep really well.

"But she tends to outgrow her normal clothes and because she has a younger female cousin, so everything gets passed on," she adds.

"So we try to keep everything as well as we can, because we know there's another generation that's going to enjoy all of that down the line," Lea states.

Parenting style

Lea Salonga's daughter Nicole Beverly Chien to husband Robert Charles Chien is now a 13-year old teenager.

The Éponine actress from the Les Misérables: The Dream Cast in Concert claims that she's still a slight denial about the fact that she's now a mom of a teenager, but she shares a few of her parenting style.

Lea reveals, "My parenting tends to be, I mean, I don't, I'm not a Nazi, I guess."

She adds, "With her, I tend to be not permissive, but i tend to take it a hands-on approach with her. I have to give her certain freedoms also, because she's not going thru life in the same way that I did as a kid that age."

"So she has a much more normal existence, I guess. Compared to me, she gets a lot of sports, which was I didn't do. She's able to take more risks with stuff," Lea expresses.

The singer-theater actress reveals, "I mean in school—she fences, she also skateboards, she bikes, and she skis. So i guess she has a much more active lifestyle compared to me."

"And we're like, 'you gotta do everything,' 'you gotta try all of that.' I can't be like this helicopter-protective type of parent, because I mean she might end up wanting to break away and rebel in undesirable ways," Lea claims.

Lastly, Lea shares, "She's able to express her creativity with her haircuts and that sort of thing. And we let her, it's like, 'it's a haircut, hair will grow back.'"

Keeping Nicole's life private

Lea Salonga has kept 13 years of daughter Nicole's life very private even though she's still out in the limelight and Nicole wouldn't had it any other way.

The Miss Saigon lead discloses, "She likes it that way. She's not, I mean she's somebody that's leery of strangers. She's suspicious of people she doesn't know and she doesn't open up until she's comfortable with the other person, which is exactly what I like.

"She isn't immediately trusting of people that she doesn't know and there have been people that kind of assume that they can go near her and she gets immediately frightened and immediately alarmed," she conveys.

"And I'm so happy that that's her instinct—her instinct is to run, so I'm like, 'we're doing something right,'" Lea quips.

Also read: Lea Salonga wants her daughter to be left alone: 'She’s not a celebrity'