Pinkett Smith's Golden Rules of Parenting
1. Eat as a family. "There's flexibility about when they eat breakfast and lunch, but dinner together is sacred."
2. Enlist help. "I'm lucky to have a lot of people in my world who help me," says Pinkett Smith. That includes her mother: "She travels with me all the time, and when I travel and the kids aren't with me, she stays with them."
3. Drink water. "I tell them, 'You have three bottles of water a day, then drink what you want,'" she explains. "I'm always like, 'Listen, we've got to keep our bodies strong—we got too much stuff to do!'"
4. Respect their boundaries. Staying out of kids' space can teach them to be responsible for their own decisions and mistakes, she says: "Is it their room, or are they borrowing the space while they're living in your house? If it's theirs, then they should be able to do whatever they want with it. If it's their clothes, they have the right to do whatever they want with those clothes. We have to give them some freedom to be who they are."
5. Choose your battles. For instance, she doesn't prescribe what the kids are going to wear—even for the paparazzi. "Who is it going to hurt, really, if she has orange balloon pants on the red carpet?" she says. "I try to stay outside my ego and what I want and to respect them as I expect them to respect me."
6. Expose and educate. "We go to church as a family on Sunday, but we study world religion during the week as well. We read excerpts from the Bible, from Hindu texts, Kabbalah, Judaism...."
