Celebrities are just like us. They want to be the best parents to their children, they often doubt themselves, and they look for parenting advice on Instagram.
In a recent interview for the Black Joy Issue of Kindred by PARENTS, GRAMMY award-winning singer and actress Kelly Rowland opens up about how she’s trying to break generational curses and take a new approach to parenting while raising sons Titan, 8, and Noah, 2, whom she shares with husband Tim Weatherspoon.
Raised by a single mom who nannied to make ends meet, Rowland’s relationship with her father was icy for a big chunk of her life – she even kept him away from her Destiny’s Child shows when she was a teenager.
The two spent thirty years apart before reconnecting after the birth of her oldest son, Titan and the death of her mother, Doris Rowland Garrison, in 2014. But when she finally sat down and listened to his side of the story, Rowland said she couldn’t help but give her father a little grace for his shortcomings.
“He’s telling me about his dynamic with his father, and his father’s father, and it’s non-existent, too,” Rowland told TODAY in a 2022 interview. “So how can one learn how to be something when they weren’t taught?”
As Rowland tries to do things differently with her sons, she says she and her family depend on the support of an amazing village that includes her in laws and her Destiny’s Child “sisters.” But she adds that she gets a lot of advice from therapy and Instagram.
The “Dilemma” singer says her parenting sweet spot is a blend of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s growth mindset which suggests people can achieve anything with hard work and dedication and the late rapper Nipsey Hussle’s approach to instilling integrity in his kids – teaching that integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking. And she hopes the result is putting confident Black men into the world.
“I just want to get this right. I want to really be a part of bringing some really amazing young man forth into the world. That was my only prayer,” Rowland told Kindred by PARENTS. “My only prayer was to have really great young Black men in this world who were sure of themselves and didn’t have to be told who they were. I really cared about that because the narrative is tough as it is.”
And while parenting is one job that doesn’t come with a set of instructions, Rowland said she’s trying not to be so hard on herself.
“I hate to mess up. But I’m literally giving myself grace,” Rowland said. “I’m learning that maybe all of the decisions that my mom made were not the greatest decisions. And I’m trying to change that this generation.”