"People treat me like I’m not a normal human"- When Jaden Smith opened up about the challenges of growing up as a celebrity kid

Jaden Smith is a universally known name, and it feels like he would have been nearly just as popular without his own array of achievements, simply because he is the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. While being born into Hollywood royalty may come with its perks, there are also challenges that some star kids need to navigate.

For Jaden Smith, who made his film debut with his father, Will Smith, in The Pursuit of Happyness in 2006, the challenges came from trying to be socially acceptable, especially when he was growing up. In an interview dating back to 2018, Smith spoke about how people never treated him like he was normal, which made him feel a sense of alienation. Speaking to Dazed about this, Jaden Smith said:

"People treat me like I’m not a normal human so much, that you start to believe [it], like, ‘Am I not a normal human?’...I didn’t always get to hang out with normal people when I was young. So being older and being able to hang out with the big kids and play with normal people is fun."

Despite these challenges, he finally navigated through them and found a community in the New York skateboarding scene, where he could act normal and where people accepted him as just another skater. He discussed this in detail in the same interview with Dazed.

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"I feel like I now have a home in the skate parks of New York"- Jaden Smith on finding the right environment among the skaters in New York

In 2018, Jaden Smith played a prominent role in Skate Kitchen, which anyhow required him to know and submerge himself in the sport. During the interview, where he opened up about the way he was always treated as something beyond ordinary, he was discussing this very movie.

So, at the time, he was already hanging around skaters and navigating the skating scene in New York. However, in this community, he found people who would simply accept him as another skater, which was a big deal for Jaden Smith. He spoke about this in the interview, saying:

"When I go to skate parks, people are like, ‘Oh shit, is that Jaden Smith?’ for about the first five minutes. Then after that, it’s totally fine and I’m another skater,...Because of this movie, people in the skating community won’t be that surprised to see me at a skate park. They’ll know from a friend, or a friend of a friend, that they saw me the whole summer when I was in New York shooting the movie and skating. I feel like I now have a home in the skate parks of New York."

Jaden Smith has not been very actively involved in acting over the years but has remained a big part of the music scene. Apart from making some big waves with his songs, in 2022, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

Currently 26 years old, Jaden has passed the phase of people treating him like a special kid and is now a renowned name himself. Anyhow, the future seems to be bright for the young man.