In a recent episode of Jada Pinkett Smith’s Facebook Watch series, Red Table Talk, the actress spoke about the pressures of child-rearing during the digital age — she says she faced “hardcore criticism” when daughter Willow Smith went bald.
She was joined by cohost and mother Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Willow, 19, and guests Ashley Graham, Jessica Alba and Maren Morris.
“When you first cut your hair,” Pinkett Smith said, “I mean, there was a firestorm.”
The Gotham actress says that despite the backlash, she remained focused on what was important.
“Looking at how my children were being affected, that’s what count,” she said. “When people are like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe you shaved Willow’s head!’ If they coulda seen this child’s expression of freedom looking at her hair falling to the ground, so me as a mom looking at that, experiencing that with her—there is nothing that anyone could say to me to tell me that it was wrong.”
She continued, “Not one person because I was there, I was looking at her, I saw her face, I knew the journey that she and I took together to get to that point, and so, it didn’t really matter what anybody said.”
She also touched on the reaction from the Black community after son Jaden, 22, appeared in the 2016 ad alongside three female models in skirts.
“I got shamed a lot for Willow,” she said. “But Jaden — that was hardcore. I think as Jaden got older, and he did the Louis Vuitton, and he was wearing a skirt and then he isn’t what people consider your typical Black man, which is like, what is that supposed to mean?”
