Will Smith: I'm a way better father than I am a husband

After getting married at age 24 to first wife Sheree Zampino, Smith soon became a father to son Trey, now 27. It was then that he began to comprehend “the real weight of parenting.” “I brought him home, we put him in the bassinet, it was like stark terror,” said Smith. I’m not that good.” Related Facebook post When Trey was just 2 years old, Smith and Zampino split up. Though he’s expressed guilt over the divorce, Pinkett Smith, whom he married in 1997, noted, “just because a man might not be the best husband doesn’t mean he’s not a good father.” “With Sheree and with Trey, that was a really difficult time. “I’ve been hurt a lot in my adult life, but I don’t think anything touches the failure of getting divorced from my 2-year-old son’s mother. Sheree and I ran into that — if a man’s not a great husband, then he loses hisparental rights. In that process, you start fighting for your rights, and the kid is in the middle.” Due to his own troubled relationship with his father, Smith knew he needed to control his own frustrations during the divorce. “But in the first couple years of Trey’s life, because Sheree and I were divorced, I think my desire to never have my son see me in that way made me more absent as a father. We not gonnabe cursing, fighting.” Despite their early struggles, it was then that Smith turned to his own father for support. Following his dad’s advice that “you’ll never win if you fight a kid’s mother,” Smith chose to surrender. Back in 2018, Smith took to social media to discuss his own relationship with his oldest son. “Her record is ‘Whip My Hair.’ I’m like, that’s a protest against me.” It was his experience with Willow that Smith said “introduced me to feelings.” “I would say that ‘Whip My Hair’ thing put a pause button on my overt parenting. I stopped, and I just started watching my kids, and with Willow, I started to see that there was a higher value in talking to her about how she feels about the situation versus how to fix the situation, and it became the new thought process for me,” he said. Pinkett then surprised Smith with a series of videos made by his three kids, including 21-year-old son Jaden.