How Will Smith Pushed Willow Smith To The Brink Of A Mental Breakdown

It’s often easy to disregard that children have to be children when parents are in the entertainment industry, especially when they are at this scale of stardom and fame. For Will Smith, who has broken the barriers of being an actor to becoming an A-list celebrity, it was more than logical for him to get her daughter Willow started in the business quite young, specifically at the age of 10.

As her dad and mentor in life, Will did what he believed would benefit her daughter in the long run; however, by doing that, he may have pushed her a little too far to the point where it drove her to the edge and took her to a really dark place where Willow couldn’t forgive her father for forcing her to work when she just wanted to be a normal kid.

After ‘Whip My Hair’ came out in 2010 and became a massive hit, she was an instant star, bringing fame and pressure alongside it. However, she knew immediately that she wasn’t interested in music or the industry as she didn’t want to be the center of attention or be in the public eye anymore.

However, Will couldn’t catch onto his daughter’s disinterest in the music industry as he kept disregarding Willow’s cries of not wanting to continue. It came to the breaking point when she was on tour with Justin Bieber; Willow explained her urge to stop performing and voiced that her thoughts didn’t hold any weight to her dad.

Although Will didn’t take it seriously at first once she saw his baby girl walk downstairs with a shaved head, it was the final straw that made him realize that he was pushing her too much into something she desperately wanted to quit.

In an episode of the Red Table Talk on Facebook Watch, hosted by Willow’s mother, Jada Pinkett Smith, alongside her grandmother Adrienne Banfield-Norris and herself, she discussed the repercussions of being forced into the industry at a very young age to work by more so from her father has caused in her life.

Willow explained that she had to take a couple of years to forgive her dad for what she went through, as there were moments when he was too harsh. She felt that none of the adults who were supposed to care didn’t listen to her and value her opinion. Once the craziness settled and she was set on not finishing the album, she spiraled into a deep dark hole to the point where she even started cutting herself to cope with her pain.

Willow Smith’s words about Will Smith’s harshness that pushed her to a dark place read:

“I definitely had to forgive you and daddy for that whole ‘Whip My Hair’ thing. It was mostly daddy because he was so harsh at certain times.”

“It was a couple of years, honestly. Trying to regain trust for not feeling like I was being listened to or like no one cared how I felt.”

She added:

“After the tour and the promotion and all of that, they wanted me to finish my album, and I was like, I’m not going to do that. And after all of that kind of settled down, and it was like a lull, I was listening to a lot of dark music. It was just so crazy, and I plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself.

Willow had to pull herself out of that dark place she was in and take a much-needed hiatus from the public eye. Once she was ready and her love for music had reignited again, she returned with her debut album ‘Ardipithecus’ in 2015 as a pop record.

However, after discovering herself and her music taste further, she came out with her 2021 album, ‘Lately I Feel Everything,’ where she switched to a more punk, alternative rock genre, which she has continued to ride on with her latest release in 2022 ‘<Coping Mechanism>.’