Tragic Details About Willow Smith

This feature discusses mental health issues and self-harm.

Willow Smith's ode to tossing tresses took flight on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2010, but the "Whip My Hair" singer didn't need a hit song to make a name for herself. As the child of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, fame was her birthright — and it came with some serious downsides. "Growing up and trying to figure out your life ... while people feel like they have some sort of entitlement to know what's going on, is absolutely, excruciatingly terrible," Willow told Girl Gaze (via ET) in 2017.

At a young age, fame also forced Willow to make a decision that would have ramifications on every aspect of her life, from her career to her relationships: whether to hide from the spotlight or embrace it. She chose the latter, becoming an introspective artist who makes genre-jumping seem effortless. For the "Meet Me at Our Spot" singer, this pathway was the option that provided her with the best opportunity to make a positive impact on the world. She succinctly described her thoughts on fame to Rolling Stone UK as thus: "I don't really like headlines, but I do like messages."

Willow wants the messages in her music to resonate with her fans in a rewarding way, saying, "I'm just always trying to make people happy and find themselves." But while she told Glamour UK that she's an optimist who tries not to let others' negativity halt her pursuit of happiness, she's not immune from hardships and pain.

"Whip My Hair" was released just one day before Willow Smith's 10th birthday, and soon, she found herself touring with Justin Bieber. But while she followed up the infectious earworm with the less successful singles "21st Century Girl" and "Fireball," a debut album featuring her debut song never materialized.

For Smith, becoming an overnight sensation at such a young age was a massive burden. She told The Face that it put immense pressure on her to keep her nose to the grindstone, to her own detriment. "When you have to work and a lot of people's incomes are on the line if you don't perform well, that's not conducive with childhood," she said. On top of having so much riding on her continued success, she found herself in a dark place and soon realized that she badly needed to press pause on her music career. "I feel like if I hadn't, there might have been some earlier tragedies," she said on SiriusXM's "Bevelations." When host Bevy Smith asked her how she knew that taking a break was worth passing up opportunities beyond other singers' wildest dreams, Smith said, "I had touched a sadness that I didn't know existed, and that was terrifying."

She told NME that she even tried giving up singing for good. "I didn't make music for a whole year, which is insane for me," she said. However, she discovered that she loved it too much to leave it.

On "Red Table Talk," Willow Smith said that Jaden Smith got a lot more coddling from Jada Pinkett Smith than she ever did. She recalled how her mom would yell at her to get her out of bed while speaking softly to Jaden and allowing him to get a few extra ZZZs. "I knew that she's gonna have it twice as hard," Jada explained. "I needed you to be strong because I know what this world is like for us as Black women." 

But Jada's fear of the world hurting Willow caused her to hurt her own daughter. According to Willow, Jada was so determined to toughen her up that she pushed her child away when she was in desperate need of the emotional support of a loving parent. "If I would be crying or have an upset, the energy was always like, 'Take that somewhere else and deal with it on your own,'" Willow said during another episode of "Red Table Talk."

How Jada reacted to her tears was clearly something that affected Willow deeply because the topic came up again on "Red Table Talk" the following year. "You pushing me away for crying was like, I'm a bad person for crying," she said to Jada, who confessed to using shame to parent her daugther. Willow told her mom that she was forgiven.

Willow Smith's struggles with anxiety began when "Whip My Hair" whipped all the adults around her into a frenzy. Apparently, their expectation was that she would promote the track with no pushback, and when she dared to speak out about any discomfort she was experiencing, her feelings were disregarded. Willow was booked to perform on "The Tonight Show" during those tumultuous tween years, and she experienced an anxiety attack when it was go time. "Everyone around me was like, 'You're just a brat. Why aren't you grateful?' They didn't see it as an anxiety attack, they saw it as a tantrum," she recalled on "The Yungblud Podcast."

Willow herself wouldn't realize that she'd suffered an anxiety attack until she was older. At the time, her mother was also unaware that Willow was struggling with a serious mental health issue. On "Red Table Talk," Willow suggested that Jada Pinkett Smith had experienced so many hardships in her life that anxiety seemed like a trivial concern to her. "That was very frustrating for me as a child, because I was like, 'How can you not see my internal, emotional struggle?'" she said. Her anxiety got so bad ahead of one modeling job that she started uncontrollably vomiting.

In another episode of "Red Table Talk," she said of her anxiety attacks, "There's shame. There's guilt. There's sadness. There's confusion. And then you don't even want to talk about it because you're like, 'I feel crazy.'"

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.

On "The Yungblud Podcast," Willow Smith spoke about some of the negative emotions she grappled with early in her music career. "For so long, I had a lot of fear that was just in my heart," she said. "I felt extremely unsafe." Unfortunately, her decision to take a break from performing and recording music didn't prove to be a salve that made everything better. "I was kind of just in this gray area of, 'Who am I? Do I have a purpose? Is there anything I can do besides this?'" she recalled on "Red Table Talk."

After she made the decision to forgo recording a hip-hop album, Willow found herself uncertain of what to do next. "I was just listening to a lot of dark music. It was just so crazy and I was plunged into this black hole, and I was cutting myself," she said. "I was experiencing so much emotional pain." This revelation stunned her mother. "Willow, I had no idea. I never saw any signs of that," Jada Pinkett Smith said, expressing relief that her daughter had stopped. In an interview with People, Willow said that she managed to pull herself out of that dark place by reaching the realization that harming herself wasn't helping matters. What did help was looking inward and embracing what she saw. "It seemed literally psychotic after a certain point because I had learned to see myself as worthy," she said.

If you or someone you know needs help with mental health, please contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.

When 13-year-old Willow Smith was photographed laying on the same bed as 20-year-old actor Moisés Arias, some outlets decided to play the shame game with Willow. "Whoa! Is Willow Smith into older men?" Hollywood Life wrote — before proceeding to note that Arias was good friends with Willow's brother and that there was zero physical contact between Arias and Willow in the innocuous image. And when the Smiths were investigated by the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services, social workers were apparently more concerned about Willow's diet than any potentially inappropriate relationship.

On "Red Table Talk," Jada Pinkett Smith revealed that someone had contacted the department and accused her and Will Smith of starving their daughter. When it was time for her interview with a social worker, Willow came up with a way to prove that what was arguably an extreme form of body-shaming was complete hogwash. "I walked in with a bowl of cereal," Willow said. "I was like, 'You know what? I'm going to walk in with food, and I'm gonna eat the entire time!'" According to Willow, what bothered her most about being interviewed was what a waste of resources it was. "I was looking at the lady and the whole time I was thinking, 'You could be helping so many kids right now, and you're wasting your time with a child who has everything that they need,'" she recalled.

In addition to being a target of trolls due to her celebrity status, Willow Smith has been confronted with discrimination. Speaking to Spin, she revealed that one of her most memorable experiences being judged based on her appearance came when an employee at a high-end clothing store didn't realize who she was. "I was like, 'Oh, I have an account here,'" Smith recalled saying, to which the employee replied, "You must be mistaken." But Smith didn't need the employee to type her name into a computer to validate her claim; she was an ambassador for the store's brand, and her picture was on the wall. "Obviously, I didn't get what I was going to get because I felt so humiliated. It wasn't a good feeling," Smith said.

She's also been on the receiving end of racist remarks intended to be compliments. "I've ran into situations with white men specifically who are like, 'Black girls don't usually look like you,' or, 'Whoa, your hair is lying down. That's crazy, you actually look pretty!'" she told Billboard.

When Smith became a Chanel ambassador, her aim was to inspire other Black women and girls to not let people like that employee make them feel like they don't belong. Nor should they allow white men to decide what is beautiful. "I know a lot of girls that look like me feel that they're not beautiful," she told The Telegraph. "I want them to know that's not true."