They share the same wide smiles, twinkling eyes, and sparkling presences, but Tabitha Brown and lookalike daughter Choyce Brown have very different personas. They also have different approaches when coping with challenges; a lesson Tabitha learned when Choyce endured racist bullying as a child in a predominantly white elementary school. The mother and daughter shared how they dealt with that difficult period during a fireside chat with DeVon Franklin in celebration of the author and motivational speaker’s new Audible Original release, It Takes a Woman—and how the disturbing experience ultimately helped Tabitha learn how to parent her child.
“This is my child, but she’s not mine,” said Tabitha, “And so, I have to let her become, and then she has to tell me who she is, even as I parent her. Because if I don’t allow her to show me who she is, I can’t parent her.”
As Choyce, an influencer in her own right, explains, who she is at 20 is exactly the image she projected when she was six years old, if not better. But that journey included a painful interval where she wasn’t sure who she was at all—and her parents had to allow her to figure that out for herself.
“I had to learn that—and I also had to unlearn how I was raised,” said Tabitha. “[Because] I was raised like, ‘you gotta tell me what’s goin’ on’…and that doesn’t work for Choyce.” Understanding the two had different communication and coping skills proved to be a breakthrough in forming what is still a very close mother-daughter relationship.
“What she taught me was how to listen to her; how to see her—as just a human, not as my child,” said Tabitha. “And when I got that, and I was able to hear her, I could parent her better. I could help her more.”
Hear the full segment of this multi-part conversation in our video above…and check out It Takes a Woman on Audible.
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