One-word answers are not enough for La La Anthony. The celebrity mom tells Latina how she encourages her son, Kiyan, to engage in wholesome dialogue.
“My son, Kiyan, has a sensitive side, but he doesn’t show it often,” she explains. “One thing about Kiyan that’s similar to his dad is that they’re very quiet and [keep] to themselves. So if I ask him, ‘What are you thinking,’ he’ll say, ‘No, I’m fine, I’m fine.’ It takes a lot to get it out of them. You just have to pull a little bit, because he’s not the kid that’s going to tell you everything.”
Although Kiya lives on the reserved side of the spectrum, La La has a way of getting him to share his feeling with her. “I know how to deal with my kid,” she tells Latina. “I’m very forthcoming, I’m really expressive. I just try to teach him, ‘Come on, you can talk to me. I’m your best friend. Tell me what’s going on.’ With Kiyan, I don’t want a one-word answer. I don’t want: ‘How was school?’ ‘Good.’ ‘How was your day?’ ‘Good.’ ‘How do you feel?’ ‘Good.’ No, we need to have conversations. Give me more than that. So I push him.”
Pushing Kiyan to be expressive like her does not mean that La La is an open book to the press. Her current standing as the estranged wife of Carmelo Anthony has especially tested the waters of her preferred level of privacy.
“Obviously I hear things,” she shares. “You want to say, ‘No, that’s not true’ or ‘If you really got to know me, you would know I’m not this or that,’ but you realize you can’t do that, so my thing is, as long as my core—my family and my friends—know who I am as a person and what’s going on, that’s what’s important to me.”
La La and Carmelo Anthony were married for six years before news of their separation spread earlier this year. The couple’s son celebrated his tenth birthday in March.
