Giada DeLaurentiis' daughter just hit a major milestone: starting high school.
The celebrity chef 52, opened up about Jade DeLaurentiis-Thompson's exciting "new chapter," telling E! News it has "been a fun couple of months."
"I will say, she's really integrating great," she shared in an exclusive interview on Oct. 11. "I just think it's so funny to start a new school. It's just so different than where she was at, and I think it's so funny, they do so much growing up in one summer. I feel like I have a little lady on my hands when [she was just a] kid just last June."
Giada went on to dish out advice to other moms of high school girls, sharing that she tends to "just listen" to her 14-year-old daughter rather than try and counsel her.
"They just really want to have someone who will sort of be a friendly ear," she explained. "Not really someone who's always trying to get some advice or fixing it. So that's my piece of advice and that's what I like to do is just to listen to her. Truly just listen to her not like on my phone and listen at the same time, but truly just sit there and I lay on her bed and I listen to what she has to say. And then sometimes I give advice, but most times, I don't."
She added, "I take it one day at a time. There's really not a manual."
When she's not helping her daughter through her freshman year, Giada is staying busy with the launch of on Giadzy, her new ecommerce lifestyle platform offering curated goods Italy.
"Giadzy is a marketplace, really," she explained. "It's also a content platform as well. So basically, it's all things Italian. We tell stories about Italian purveyors. We tell my family stories. We have recipes. We have tips and hacks and all sorts of things Italian. And then we have a marketplace so that when you look at these recipes, you can also get the ingredients."
While Giada says she originally found her passion for food by spending time with her grandfather in the kitchen, she doesn't expect her daughter to follow in her culinary footsteps. The Food Network star said Jade—whose dad is Giada's ex-husband Todd Thompson—"likes to bake from time to time," but admitted "cooking is not necessarily her thing."
"She used to like to cook. I don't know if it's because she's trying to be more independent and not be like her mother—and maybe somebody when she's older she might come around again—but for right now, no," she continued. "She's more of a musical theater kid."
Giada quipped, "But she does like to eat, so that is helpful."