Brooklyn Beckham, 27, and his wife Nicola Peltz, 31, want to be a global power couple just like his parents Victoria, 52, and David, 51, whom he no longer speaks to – and they plot to have a commercial enterprise that is bigger and better than his estranged family’s “brand Beckham”.
That’s despite Brooklyn telling the world earlier this year in an explosive and lengthy Instagram post that brand Beckham was the bane of his life. He said that “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships” were a fixture of his life and that his parents put the brand before love.
But according to reports, his parents’ business template and mirroring them is their eldest son’s next move.
Brooklyn is reportedly being secretly coached by his billionaire father-in-law Nelson Peltz, 84, who thinks his best chance of success lies in using his fame and name to sell “everyday products”. Brooklyn is always promoting his Cloud23 hot sauce that he launched in 2024, but now he intends to go global with the aim of building it up product by product.
“He’s [Nelson} told him how it will always generate income until one day he’ll have such brand recognition that it will be a logical step to then have loads of restaurants,” the source told The Sun.
Brooklyn is “determined to forge his own career path”, according to reports, so that everyone can see “how well he has done after walking away from the Beckham brand and name”.
“He believes that with Nelson’s help, [he] and Nicola are going to become more famous and build a bigger empire than his parents.”
Why do we find it so hard to break away from the family script?
Brand Brooklyn doesn’t sound too dissimilar from brand Beckham. However hard we try to be different from our parents, it is so often exactly what happens.
Not only has Brooklyn married a carbon copy lookalike of his mother, but now he intends to commodify their relationship – just like his parents did.
So this latest plan for brand Brooklyn reeks of hypocrisy – and I am sure any future Beckham-Peltz kids will all be involved in this brand fam, because it is seemingly all anyone knows.
And we’re all guilty of it to some extent. I fully admit that I have also had similar patterns in love to my parents – becoming a love addict like my dad and rescuing men like my co-dependent mum – which was hard to untangle and stop even with all the therapy.
But why, when so many of us spend so much time telling all our friends how gobsmackingly wrong our parents were, do we find it so hard to break away from the family script?
Dr Joy Conlon, an integrative psychotherapist at Alive365, says that Brooklyn, just like many of us, will be drawn to familiar patterns because it all feels “normal”.
“The brain often confuses familiarity with safety. A behaviour in our family or with our parents may have been upsetting or unhelpful, but if we experienced it consistently, it can still feel predictable and strangely comfortable,” Dr Conlon tells me.
Because of this, our earliest relationship patterns are absorbed into the subconscious; she says that we are not always aware of what draws us towards particular people or relationships – or even major career decisions like Brooklyn is making.
“Families pass down beliefs about money, our value, what success looks like, about gender roles, about parenting and what children should do for their parents, about emotions and how relationships should work,” she adds.
“We may consciously disagree with our parents’ beliefs but can still be influenced by them. They can still shape what we expect from a partner, what we can tolerate, how we view success and how we measure our own sense of worth.”
We also repeat what was never resolved – and Brooklyn may hope to pull off brand Beckham with a happier ending. “Without realising it, we can recreate similar situations with friends and partners in the hope that this time they will end differently,” she says.
Trying to be the complete opposite of a parent can still mean that their behaviour is controlling our choices, she says. Change, however, requires more than good intentions.
“Saying ‘I will never become like my parents’ tells us what we do not want, but it does not teach us what to do instead,” she says.
“Until we make the unconscious pattern conscious, becoming like our parents or entering similar relationships, can feel almost inevitable.” However, she says, it is not our destiny: “We inherit the original blueprint, but we can learn to redraw it.”
Dr Emma Svanberg, clinical psychologist and author of 2023’s Parenting for Humans: How To Parent the Child you Have, As the Person You Are says there are lots of reasons why we end up turning into our parents, even if we really don’t want to.
“It doesn’t really matter how much we know that we want to do things differently. What matters is if we have taken the time and space to confront the difficult experiences from our own childhood, and the relational patterns we’ve inherited, if we don’t want to repeat them,” she tells me.
A behaviour in our family or with our parents may have been upsetting or unhelpful, but if we experienced it consistently, it can still feel predictable and strangely comfortable
Dr Joy Conlon, integrative psychotherapist at Alive365
Often this shows up for people in challenging moments, when we can find our parents’ voices coming out of our mouths, often catching us by surprise. “The reason this happens is that, under stress, we react automatically,” she says. “In challenging moments, especially those that trigger tough memories from our own past, that means repeating things we experienced from our own childhood.”
Of course, this also means we can automatically repeat positive and connected parenting experiences too. But in Brooklyn’s case, a dream to rival brand Beckham doesn’t sound too healthy. If he had truly broken away from a damaging parental cycle, he’d not be going into the same family module; he’d be doing something totally different.
And if he seriously looked at himself and Nicola in a nearby mirror, surely he’d see his parents looking back at him? How sad there won’t a little more self-reflection. Then he might realise that he hasn’t divorced his parents; he’s competing with them.
