Will Smith has opened up about his relationship with his daughter, Willow, on a special Father's day edition of his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith's Red Table Talk.
The one-on-one conversation with the couple, who have been married for 23 years, saw them discuss the lesson they've learned as parents. And in a particularly emotional exchange, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air actor spoke about the moment when he pushed his daughter, who was then nine-years-old, to commit to a career in music.
At the time, Willow had committed to a 30-day tour for her Whip My Hair! album. But after a few shows, she told her father that she was ready to go home, prompting Smith to push her to complete her tour.
"She kept asking; she was like ‘But Daddy, it doesn’t matter how I feel?’ And I was like ‘Yes, baby it does matter how you feel, but you have to finish what you started," he told his wife.
"She made you have to fall back on your military-style," Pinkett-Smith replied.
Watch the Red Table Talk episode below:Smith, however, was convinced that he was doing the right thing as a father, until Willow shaved her head in an act of "protest".
Willow first shaved her hair off in 2012, and in 2019, she conceded that she saw it as "the perfect way to rebel."
Recalling the moment, Smith continued: "It was so devastating to me when she shaved her head bald. Because her record is Whip My Hair! I’m like, ‘That’s a protest against me!’ Whether it was or wasn’t… I took that as a sign from the Gods that I was like, this little girl is rejecting what I’m trying to do for her. She doesn’t want it."
"It was like she made music, she enjoyed it and she was finished. And she was hard with it. She was crying. She was scared. But what she wasn’t going to do is do something that she didn’t want to do…
"[And in that moment], I saw how much I was making and forcing and pushing the things that I wanted. And at that moment, I just saw it was starting to hurt her."
Will Smith once held an "intervention" for his son Jaden over his diet:"My desire for her was overriding her desire for her, and I had a real epiphany on that and how bad a person will hate you if you keep forcing your wishes onto their life," he added, detailing that his daughter "introduced me to feelings" and "destroyed all of my belief systems."
"Because if I don’t care about how I feel, I damn sure don’t care how you feel," the father-of-three continued.
''I would say that Whip My Hair! thing put a pause button on my overt parenting. I stopped, and I just started watching my kids, and with Willow, I started to see that there was a higher value in talking to her about how she feels about the situation versus how to fix the situation. It became the new thought process for me.''
