Jaden Smith Opened up About Being Raised as a Celebrity Child — ‘You’re Not a Normal Human’
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith‘s 22-year-old son, Jaden Smith, was raised in the spotlight. While fame and fortune gave him just about anything he wanted, it was not an easy road. Jaden opened up about feeling like he wasn’t a “normal human,” and it’s part of why he emancipated himself at the age of 16.
Jada Pinkett was heartbroken when Jaden decided to leave
“I remember this day specifically,” Jada said during one Facebook Watch Red Table Talk. “It was probably one of the most heartbreaking moments of my life.”
However, she knew that Jaden was right for requesting to leave their “bubble.”
“You got to a point here,” she explained to daughter Willow Smith and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris. “You told me straight up—you were like, ‘Mom, I have to leave here to live my life.’ I remember thinking to myself, as devastated as I was, I was like, ‘He’s right. The time is now. He’s 15. It’s time for him to leave the house.”
She admits that she knew from a young age that this moment was going to come.
“I knew,” she continued. “I told Will when Jaden was smaller. ‘We’ll be lucky to keep him in the house ’til he’s 16 because he was so mature. He was making films. He could really manage his own life.”
Jaden starred in his first film with Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness when he was only 8-years-old.
“Being in this lifestyle, in this world, is a bubble, and he wanted out, and I understood that, because I didn’t have the bubble,” she concluded. “I knew what having my freedom — outside of the bubble — what I gained from that. I knew that the sooner I let him go, the faster he was gonna come back.”
Jaden gave insight into what it was like growing up ‘Smith’
Jada told her children during the same talk show that there is a part of their life that she knows nothing about. She wants to know what it was like growing up “privileged, as famous actors’ children.
“You’re not a normal human if you can’t go out into the world,” Jaden begins. “I don’t know how things always work. I always get nervous at the end of dinner. How do you have dinner with a group of people? When I have dinner with my dad, he orders everything on the menu, and then he pays for everything, and then he leaves. So it’s like — Is that how we do? Does everyone expect me to do that?”
He compares going to dinner with Will Smith versus going with Jada. His mother doesn’t order everything on the menu, but she does pay for all of her friends. Jaden isn’t sure how it is supposed to work when he goes out with his “homies.”
“You have to go out in the real world to really experience that,” he continued after his sister Willow shared a time when friends tried to take advantage of her fame and fortune. “This is what my parents have been protecting me from.”
Now that Jaden had a chance to leave his bubble with his parents, he appreciates it even more.
“It just makes you appreciate, you know, being at home, being with your parents, and spending quality time with family. You get out into the world, and you kind of just understand things.”
