It has been less than a week since Ashanti and Nelly premiered their new reality show, but already the latter is turning heads.
On June 26, Peacock officially released Nelly and Ashanti: We Belong Together, which documents the couple's reignited romance after initially dating in the early aughts, and their life after their 2023 nuptials and welcoming their son last year.
And though their baby son Kareem is certainly not the "Hot In Herre" singer's first jab at parenting, it doesn't seem he is particularly inclined to get his hands dirty this time around.
© GettyRecent controversy
Nelly, 60, raised eyebrows this week as a clip from his new reality show went viral, one in which he emphasizes his refusal to change his son's diapers. In a confessional scene, Ashanti appears expressing her dislike for how much time Nelly will be gone for his tour, before it cuts to a scene of the two at a restaurant discussing it.
Back at the confessional, she says: "I am split about this tour. My first response is I'm super happy for him for putting it together. The wife and mommy side of me is like, '[Expletive!]' … The wife side of me and the mom side of me is a little sad. You know, daddy's going to be gone for a long time."
It then cuts back to the restaurant scene, where after Ashanti tells Nelly "it's a lot," he maintains: "Well listen, it's all you. I ain't gonna even lie. I ain't got nothing for him." He has maintained in a previous scene that his time to be hands-on would come when the baby can walk and talk.
© Getty"I'm trying to understand how is it that you sleep through when he starts crying?" Ashanti then asks, and Nelly, incredulously, wonders in turn: "Do y'all really be up at night?"
"You know what? It's absolutely ridiculous that you'll still be dead asleep and he'll be mad loud," Ashanti goes on, and as Nelly says he is "blessed" to be able to tune it out, he reminded her that he once told her: "Baby I'll give you the world, I just ain't changing no diaper."
© GettyNelly's other parenting comments
Reflecting on the balancing act that is fatherhood, Nelly told People in 2021 of parenting his four older kids: "It wasn't like I was Superman," and noted: "Obviously, Nelly wasn't there every day, but whatever needed to be done, I was definitely there. I didn't miss graduations, I showed up for sporting events and whatever I could and a lot of times, I had to be the disciplinarian."
Stepping up
In 2005, after his sister Jackie died from leukemia, Nelly adopted her kids, Shawn and Sydney. He also told People about it: "As bad as I felt and whatever I was going through, I can't imagine what they [Sydney and Shawn] were going through. It's one of those situations that you don't think about, it has to happen, that's what family does."
“I wouldn't be anything without the help of her [Jackie's] mother and family members and my brother," he also noted during an appearance on The Tamron Hall Show in 2020. "Even though I possibly bore the financial part of it and a lot of [the] discipline part when it had to come down to it, but I definitely had to have help."
© Instagram"We pick up the pieces, we mold each other and we help shape each other," Nelly added of his nephews. "But those kids helped raise me as much as I helped raise them. Because I don't know where I would be without them, without their genuine spirit of having that love around."
In addition to Kareem, who will be one on July 18, Shawn and Sydney, Nelly is also a father to daughter Channelle, 31, and son Cornell Iral, 26, whose mom is Channetta Valentine.
