The tightrope walk between parenting and being your kid’s friend was the subject of The GrOOwZone podcast this week. As a mom of five, for Shaunie Henderson, the balance has been difficult to sustain. While Shaquille O’Neal credits the mother of his children for raising “perfect” kids, sometimes things can get a little dicey when a kid or two attempts to push the envelope a bit far. Shaunie’s husband, Keion, narrated the most recent example of the same when one of the O’Neal kids attempted to give the family a hard time….

In the latest episode of the podcast on November 27, the couple sat down for an honest talk on raising kids, and discussed the age old debate on whether parents and kids can be friends. In the midst of that came an honest confession from Shaunie, that many mothers will surely relate to: “You can’t fix everything for them. And I’m one of those parents…I literally do try to fix everything for my kids, but I had to get to a point where it’s like, you have to stop fixing everything for them. Because here I am, now you know, with a 22-year-old. They will still call and be like, ‘Mom, can you set up my dentist appointment?’ because I was that parent that just did everything, so I’m not equipping them with the tools they need to just become independent adults.”

“Funny” Shaunie said that as per Keion, as he had just the story to complement it. At the time of filming this week’s podcast episode, the couple had a family dinner at a restaurant with Amirah, Shaqir, and Me’Arah. Before the dinner, 21-year-old Shaqir did something that ended up annoying his stepdad. “Shaqir is 21… this man looks across the table at you [Shaunie] and says, ‘Mama, can you order my food.’ And I’m thinking in my head…You better not order this grown man food’.” 

To Keion’s relief, Shaunie refused. But it doesn’t end there. “Do you know what he did? He looked at his younger sister, who’s 17, and made her order it.” Shaqir’s odd insistence seemed to get on Keion’s nerves who, at that moment, “wanted to push him out of that chair and step on his ankle. Why are we asking our mother, at 20… with no shame, to order our food?”

And while Shaunie accepted it’s her “fault” for perhaps babying her children too much, the Basketball Wives executive producer honestly confessed, “I think sometimes he just does things to see if he could do them.” 

But if you ask O’Neal, despite Shaunie expressing her shortfalls, he couldn’t have asked for a better partner to mother his children—one who made it easier for him to be a father. In a conversation with Today.com last year, the 52-year-old revealed, “Because of the environment my children grew up in, my (parenting) style didn’t have to be that hard,” he said before adding, “I was gone a lot because of my job and I didn’t always want to be the bad guy, so I sort of relinquished my position as (disciplinarian)…I was the one chasing the kids around the house and taking them to Toys’R’Us. I didn’t want to come home after a bad day and go off the handle.”

Notably, O’Neal and Shaunie were married from 2002 to 2011, with the latter filing for separation. While it rocked the NBA world back then, in 2024, the world came face to face with the heartbreaking reality of the marriage. In her memoir, “Undefeated: Changing the Rules and Winning on My Own Terms”, that released this year, Shaunie revealed, “I enjoyed those sweet early years being a mother and raising my children; my days were always busy with kids and family, and every now and then I got to travel or enjoy a little of the NBA high life. But invisibly, my marriage was beginning to crumble.”

“As I’ve written, it wasn’t obvious early on. You know how when you first get sick, and the symptoms are so mild that you’re not even sure you are sick? That’s how things were in the early years. I was busy and happy and didn’t notice what was going on. But as the disease progressed, the symptoms became harder and harder to ignore.”

“Take Shaquille’s habit of ‘going missing;…Our chef did all the grocery shopping. His managers paid all the bills. I took care of the kids. So where was he going in the morning, during the day, and at night? No one works out that often…When we moved to Miami, I even heard a rumor that he had a condo in Miami Beach. I started to get suspicious, but he always had an answer, and I could never prove anything. Eventually, I was forced to admit that my family life wasn’t as blissful or perfect as I wanted to believe.”

And then came the most heartbreaking admission of them all: “I don’t know that I was ever really in love with the man, but I was in love with the idea of being married to the man I had a family with. I was in love with the idea of building a life together. I truly did enjoy spending time with him. [NBA] road trips gave me a chance to be with my husband and experience the NBA life for a little while.”

But like they say, all’s well that ends well, and Henderson has been enjoying her blissful life with Keion, whom she married in 2022. And, as opposed to Shaq, Keion harbors a completely different way to look at the way he would raise his children. During the discussion, the one thing that both Henderson and he agreed on was the need for setting boundaries with kids and respect: “We got to instill healthy fear, but we have to define that as respect. We got to understand that it is natural and normal for boundaries to change.”

He further added:

“I think that we can be friendly to our children but we can’t be friends with them. I think that is a safe construct for anybody who’s watching. At least that’s what we feel has worked, and we raised six of them,” Keion further added, prompting Shaunie to jokingly mention, “And I ain’t ordering no 20-year-old’s meal.”“You better not order them. I’m telling you that (laughing),” replied her husband. Well, that’s easier said than done as young Shaqir doesn’t want to an “independent adult” that quickly!

Shaqir O’Neal always turns to his mom for help

Just before Thanksgiving, Shaunie Henderson celebrated her 50th birthday on November 27. For her milestone birthday, her kids and her husband posted the sweetest messages and throwbacks online. Shaqir, who Shaquille O’Neal calls his ‘mini-me,’ pulled out the cutest pictures with his mom from the vault for this day. While it’s obvious, they’re a cute mother-son pair, Shaunie also narrated a time he overreacted.

In her memoir, Undefeated, Shaunie recalled Shaqir was on edge from stress when his older brother Shareef was diagnosed with a congenital heart condition in 2018, Shaqir imagined himself having heart trouble too and called his mom to take him to the hospital. Shaunie knew it was paranoia and tried to calm him down. But Shaqir instead made Amirah, both TSU students at the time, take him to the ER. “This was about Shareef, of course. In his mind, the chest pain might be a symptom of the same arterial deformity his brother had,” the mother wrote.

Shaqir had a bruised sternum from playing basketball and not a cardiac episode. Shaunie, and even Amirah, were annoyed by his dramatics. After this incident, Shaunie gave him a stern talk on how to differentiate a real emergency from a minor one.

So contrary to what she said on The GrOOw Zone, Shaunie does try to equip her kids with the tools to take care of themselves. But don’t we all need our mom sometimes?