Sterling K. Brown has shared the surprising reason why he shares photos of his two sons, Amaré, 10, and Andrew, 15, online.
On the Feb. 23 episode of Armchair Expert podcast, the Paradise actor got into a candid conversation with host Dax Shepard about raising children in the public eye.
Brown asked Shepard how he and Kristen Bell came to the decision to keep their daughters, Lincoln, 12, and Delta, 11, off social media.
“Talk to me about the thought process in terms of their safety, their anonymity, what have you, and how you reach that place, cuz I have a very specific take on it as well,” Brown said.
Shepard explained that safety is the driving force behind his decision not to post his daughters online. For Brown, however, that same concern has led him to take a different route.
“Your children are obviously White. My children are Black. I feel like the more I put them on social, the safer they are,” he said. “Any proximity that Black boys can have to some sort of celebrity or access or … status [or] leverage. I’m trying to make sure that they make it home.”
While Brown shares images of his sons publicly, he and his wife, Ryan Michelle Bathe, maintain firm boundaries around family time.
“If I am out with Ryan and the boys, we have a policy of no pictures,” Brown shared. “And the policy is because they deserve to have a regular night out. It’s their time. Because Ry and I have a certain amount of spotlight or whatnot, doesn’t mean that they should receive less of us.”
Brown has previously spoken about how much fatherhood means to him. During an August roundtable for the second season of Paradise, he reflected on watching his sons grow.
“I have two people who are just sort of the most important people in my life. Their names are Andrew and Amaré, and they are my sons, and they’re 14 and 9,” he said at the time. “And to anybody who’s been a parent or even has young children to see how much they change, especially when they’re young, as they accrue new skills and learn new words and stuff, it is the most magical thing to be in the presence of.”
“Being a father is the most important job that I have in my life right now,” he continued. “And so for the next nine years if I can keep working in L.A. and be like the one dude who figured it out I would be very, very excited about that, but I don’t want to miss too much of their growing up.”
