Will Smith Says It's 'Terrifying' to Raise Kids Who Aren't Afraid to Express Themselves
He joked that he and wife Jada Pinkett Smith may have made a mistake.
— -- Will Smith admits it isn't easy raising children who are free to express themselves.
"Yeah, I think it may have been a mistake," the "Concussion" joked during an interview Tuesday with disc jockey A.Dot on BBC Radio 1Xtra. "I think we may have gone too far."
Smith got more serious when A.Dot followed up with a question about how the dad handles jokes about his son Jaden, 17, modeling women's clothes for Louis Vuitton.
"There's a really powerful internal quality as an artist that as parents we encourage," Smith responded. "You gotta get out on the edge, you have to try things, you have to be comfortable doing things that people don't agree with, and you have to be comfortable doing things that you could fail.
"And Jaden is 100 percent fearless, he will do anything," he continued. "So as a parent it's scary, it's really terrifying – but he is completely willing to live and die by his own artistic decisions and he just doesn't concern himself with what people think."
Asked how he balances encouraging his kids' artistic expression while still setting limits, Smith admitted, "You're hitting on a really difficult issue in our house."
Smith explained that when Jaden goes out, he's usually in a group of "six or seven dudes, so they have a small army when they go out, so their freedom is slightly different from Willow's. Willow's a 15-year-old girl. We try to have the same rules but it's a different world, so we've been struggling with that."
Smith and wife Jada Pinkett Smith have set an 11:00 or 11:30 p.m. curfew for Willow on Fridays and Saturdays. But, like most teenage girls, Willow "keeps pushing it," Smith said. "She keeps calling and adding 15 minutes."
