Katherine Schwarzenegger is facing pushback over her latest comments about her husband, Chris Pratt.
Schwarzenegger, 36, sparked an unexpected social media debate on Tuesday, March 31, while thanking her “golden retriever husband” Pratt, 46, for building a dollhouse by hand for their children. (The couple share daughters Lyla Maria, 5 and Eloise Christina, 3, and son Ford Fitzgerald, 16 months. Katherine is also a stepmom to Pratt and ex-wife Anna Faris’ son, Jack.)
“I’ll never understand when women say, ‘I don’t need my husband,’ when I very much in fact do need my husband because who else would build our daughters a doll house,” she wrote via Instagram.
Fans debated her post in the comment section, with numerous people insisting that there was underlying — and likely inadvertent — sexism in her suggestion that a man was needed to build a child’s dollhouse. One Instagram user went so far as to call out the post’s “Handmaid’s Tale vibes.”
“Wives and women can build doll houses, too,” one person pointed out, with another adding, “My 70 year old mother builds things for grandkids. This is not specific to men.”
Yet another user argued, “Unfortunately, we [women] say that [we don’t need husbands] because we get tired of waiting for them to do the project. Which then forces us to just do it.”
Others defended Schwarzenegger’s intentions with the post, with a user insisting, “Omg these comments are ridiculous. 🙄 What a sweet thing he is doing that his daughters will remember forever.”
“Let’s be honest, he could easily afford someone to do it for him. Kudos @prattprattpratt there’s a lot of love your daughter will feel when you do it yourself,” a commenter pointed out.
Us Weekly has reached out to Schwarzenegger’s spokesperson for comment.
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Schwarzenegger has frequently discussed her and Pratt’s parenting style since they tied the knot in 2019. Speaking exclusively to Us Weekly in September 2025, she revealed that the couple try to get “back to the roots” of their ‘90s childhoods by limiting the use of electronics in their house.
“I would say storytime is a really great part of our parenting journey,” she told Us. “We don’t really do a lot of electronic stuff in our house. So, we try to have our kids be outdoors and be creative and really kind of go back to the roots of how we all grew up.”
The author added, “Storytime and book reading is such a big part of our daily routine every single day. Our kids want to read books morning, noon and night. And I feel really like this is such a sweet time that you know your kid comes up to you and says, ‘Can you read me a story? Can you read me a story?’ So, I’m really excited just being in that space now as a mom.”
Katherine was born and raised in Los Angeles by her parents, action movie icon Arnold Schwarzenegger and journalist Maria Shriver. However, Katherine has refused to rule out moving her family out of Hollywood someday.
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“I can see myself moving anywhere that my mother, father and my siblings would also move with my husband and I and my children,” she told Fox News Digital in November 2025. “So wherever that is, we can have a team huddle and all decide collectively where we’d like to go.”
She continued, “I’d like to go anywhere where we can just be around a lot of animals, me personally. But I feel like I can get that fix sprinkled in with having my home base be around my family.”
“Because there’s nothing that is more important to me than being able to be in close proximity to my parents and to my siblings,” she concluded. “And to be able to have that for our children is such a huge blessing and a gift. A gift that I can’t get anywhere else.”
Katherine is one of the former California governor’s five children. Arnold shares four — Katherine, Christina, Patrick and Christopher — with ex-wife Shriver and son Joseph Baena with Mildred Baena.
