Tina Knowles remembers growing up in a loving and raucous family of nine. She was the youngest of seven children. Add in her cousins, and they were a force to be reckoned with whenever they left the house.
At a very early age, Knowles says she was taught not to draw any attention to herself. “Pretty is as pretty does,” her mom used to say.
In other words, be quiet, know your place.
Lucky for us all, she didn’t listen. On a book tour for her new memoir, “Matriarch,” an Oprah’s Book Club selection, she talked to me at CNN’s offices in New York about what she learned from her own childhood and her choices while raising her daughters, Beyoncé and Solange Knowles.
On Mother’s Day weekend, here’s what the businesswoman, fashion designer and mother of two of the most famous entertainers in the world wanted to share.
Teaching kids to be seen and not heard was a common way of parenting back when “Mama Tina” was growing up in Galveston, Texas, during segregation. Her mom, her teachers at her Catholic school and all the adults around her made clear what role she was expected to play.
To Knowles, that translated into trying to make herself small and insignificant — even though she was born with a big personality, big feelings and many opinions. But Knowles simply couldn’t follow the quiet rule and was quickly given a nickname: “Badass Tenie B.”
“That was not a term of endearment when I was little,” Knowles told me in a recent conversation. “They used to just say, here comes that Badass Tenie B because I was hyper, I talked back.” Now, she says she recognizes her willfulness and hyper behavior stemmed from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Which, she reflects, “wasn’t a thing then.”
Knowles attended a school where nuns ruled the roost. She said there were teachers who told her she didn’t belong, that she was unsalvageable and a bad seed. The words punctured her soul and made her hate going to school.
“They thought they were doing the best thing,” Knowles said, but it hurt terribly.
She would run home to tell her mother and could not understand why her mom would never take her side. She didn’t know her mother was working herself to the bone for the church to get Knowles and her siblings an education.
From her own experience at school and in her childhood community, Knowles said it’s so important to really think about what you are saying to children. Labels can affect them for a lifetime.
“I still fight with that sometimes,” she said, “and I’m 71 years old. It’s in the back of my head: Don’t bring too much attention to yourself. It’s OK if somebody else takes credit for what you did.”
Those words still cut, so she advises parents to do things differently. “Advocate for your kids. You have to protect your kids,” Knowles said. “Make sure that the messages that they’re giving your kids are ones that they can do anything they want to do and they do belong anywhere that they want to be.”
It’s exactly the message she imparted to her girls.
Your children are watching how you treat yourself, Knowles told me, noting that her loving mother, Agnéz Beyincé, lived life in fear for her children as she tried to make sure they were not targets in the segregated US South.
But Knowles also watched her mother make exquisite outfits for all of her kids, and they were the best-dressed kids in town even though they were poor. (Knowles learned great lessons from her mother’s work as a seamstress and ended up creating most of the outfits for Destiny’s Child, Beyonce’s singing group with Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams.)
“As poor as we were, we were always the sharpest kids and just took a lot of pride in fashion and how we looked and … I think it helped us not to know how poor we were,” Knowles said. “I passed it on to my daughters … they’re very talented at putting things together. They don’t sew like I sew but they can put a button on, and they can put a hem in and take a dart in and that type of thing.”
Knowles says she knew right away that Beyoncé had found her life’s passion the first time she saw her daughter onstage. It was that obvious. But Knowles said her younger daughter could have done anything, and she didn’t really want Solange to go into the music business.
“I was terrified when Beyoncé turned around 10,” said Knowles, worried she’d lose her children to their craft and that the work would create a wedge between the sisters.
According to Knowles, the kids in Beyoncé’s singing group would say to Solange every day, “‘Be quiet, Solange,’ because she would try to choreograph (the group). You know she’s bossy, and she wanted to be involved.”
“I started noticing that Beyoncé would allow them to talk to her like that,” she said. “I saw a wall between them coming, and so I got them in therapy.”
While her family and community thought therapy could be problematic or even dangerous, she found a “wonderful” child therapist. As a result, the two sisters “are now as close as they can be. No wedge will come between them.”
Knowles encourages other parents to do the same if they see an unhealthy sibling rivalry developing between your children.
Knowles got diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and she struggled with the decision to mention it publicly or not. She decided to speak out so other people would also get screened, especially if they’ve missed a checkup or two or more.
“You get busy doing everything for everyone else,” she said, “and everything else takes a priority over your health at some point in our lives, I think (for) women in particular, but men as well.”
“I want to share it in hopes that that women would take a minute and say … I’m gonna go,” she added.
