“My style of parenting is very similar to that of my parents, minus the concept of ownership. I think that, specifically in African American households, the idea coming out of slavery, there’s a concept of your children being property and that was a major part that Jada and I released with our kids. We respect our children the way we would respect any other person. Things like cleaning up their room. You would never tell a full-grown adult to clean their room, so we don’t tell our kids to clean their rooms. We tell our kids ‘you don’t have a room, that’s our room and we are letting you borrow it.’ So the same way you would say to an adult if you let them use your car, you say, ‘Yo man, clean my car! Don’t drive around all filthy like that!’ And it’s perfectly reasonable for you to want an adult to clean your car, so we feel it’s perfectly reasonable to ask our kids to clean the rooms that we are letting them use.”
– I never would have thought the Fresh Prince of Bel Air and I would agree on much, but it turns out that Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith actually have some cool ideas about parenting. I’ve always loved their POV on Willow’s hair that it belongs to Willow and they wants their daughter to understand she controls her own body. Will echoed sentiments like these, too, saying that they don’t believe in treating their kids like “property” they own. I happen to agree! [US Weekly] [Photo: Getty]
