Photo Credit: Walmart Stores
By: Amanda Anderson-Niles
The Will Smith parenting style is a very controversial one. Will and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith have been married for over 15 years, but regardless of how long they managed to stay married the couple always finds themselves and their parenting styles as a target of criticism. To most critics, it just seems like Will and Jada treat their kids more like adults than children, and Jada and Will have defended their take on parenting on numerous occasions. However, when a joke in which Will suggested Jaden wants to be emancipated for his 15th birthday was taken a little too seriously, Will now again finds himself defending the way he runs his household with his wife. And according to Will, black people in particular find their family life so faulty because they have been conditioned to think a certain way as a result of slavery. Will tells Haute Living when asked if there are similarities between how he was raised and how he raises his own kids:
“There are definite similarities. I grew up in a family business so my father, my mother and all my brothers and sisters worked in the family business, so that’s really the only way I know how to parent. In real situations, you are going out in the real world and you are earning real money. The things you say and do in the world will affect the family for real. 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. Actually, 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 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.”
