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“I wanted my boys to have integrity and I got that from Nipsey Hussle,” said Kelly Rowland when discussing her approach to parenting.
A parent’s role in their child’s life is not only to nurture them but also teach them skills and values needed to succeed in life. For Kelly Rowland, integrity is one of the many lessons she tries to instill within her kids.
In a recent interview with Parents, the Destiny’s Child star discussed her approach to raising her sons Titan, age 8, and Noah, age 2. In addition to adopting a gentle parenting style, Rowland says she learned a few things from the late Nipsey Hussle’s ideologies.
“I wanted my boys to have integrity and I got that from Nipsey Hussle. It’s amazing to me that he would talk to his kids about making the right decision even when no one is watching. That was everything,” Rowland told Parents. “Nobody knows how much, how hard you work but you do it because you love it. I want them to be the kind of men who are proud of themselves. That’s really important to me — being good decision-makers.”
Prior to his untimely passing in 2019, rapper and father Nipsey Hussle emphasized the importance of integrity in a conversation with Stephen Curry. In the 2018 interview, Hussle how important it is for him to raise “good people, that have a foundation of principles, of integrity.” He went on to explain how he instills that in his day-to-day interactions with his daughter Emani.
“Every day when I take her to school, we have a little convo that we have before she gets out of the car,” the late rapper revealed. “[It goes] like ‘what is integrity?’ ‘Integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking.’”
Despite his daughter’s reportedly getting “sick of running the script,” Hussle made it a point to drill the concept of integrity, leadership, and confidence within her every day before she walked into school. In a similar fashion, Rowland reveals that she writes affirmations on her sons’ mirrors at the start of every school year and tries to apply parenting methods that allow her to get on her children’s level during tough conversations.
“My algorithm on Instagram is all parenting. It’s so much [about] how to speak — you get down to their level,” she said about learning parenting advice on social media. “There’s a lovely Middle Eastern woman on there. She shows you three steps to meet your child where they are when they’re angry. I’m like, ‘Okay, okay, okay. Got it!’ I’m literally that person.”
Both Rowland and Hussle acknowledged the balance of responsibility and vulnerability that comes with parenthood. And Rowland admits that she does not always get it right. In her experience, her parenting mistakes come in moments when she is pouring from an empty cup and accidentally snaps at her kids.
“I just took a peek at this book, ‘The Body Keeps the Score.’ I always think about like, ‘What did that just cost them? How did I just say that to them?’ I was blessed enough to bring this little gift forth — and out,” said Rowland. “The only job I have is don’t f–k it up.”
“I just want to get this right. I want to really be a part of bringing some really amazing young men forth into the world. That was my only prayer,” she added. “I don’t know why I’m emotional, but 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.”
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