Tina Knowles Details Protecting Beyoncé and Solange Knowles During Rise to Fame

Tina Knowles made sure nobody ever took her daughters’ power.

And that’s why it was important for her to take on a position on both Beyoncé and Solange Knowles’ teams early in their careers. 

“Very early on I owned a very successful hair salon and very early on I started doing the girls hair to earn my keep so that I could travel with them because I wanted to protect them,” Tina said during a joint interview with Donna Kelce,  Maggie Baird and Mandy Teefy published Oct. 3 for Glamour’s Women of the Year issue. “Not because I wanted to go on plane every day, cause it was nothing glamourous about it. I wanted to protect my kids because they were 14 and15 in an industry that can chew you up and spit you out.”

For, Beyoncé, 43, it was around that time she began her career with Destiny’s Child alongside Ms. Tina’s “bonus daughter” Kelly Rowland. 

Meanwhile, Solange, 38, found success as a teen actress before branching into music herself.  Still, amid all their fame and growth, Tina recalled the moment that she would have to be there to protect her kids throughout their decades-long careers.

“After a while I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll get to go back home.’ But I never did because I saw the need to be there.”

Echoing sentiments Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s mom Maggie shared with her fellow moms, she added, “Like Maggie said, you’re the person that doesn’t have any other agenda. Those are your kids, and you want to protect them, and they need protection trust me.”

While reflecting on fame with her fellow moms of superstars—Mandy is Selena Gomez’s mom while Donna is mom to NFL stars Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce—Tina said that protecting her daughters from social media has been a challenge, despite them being all grown up.

“That’s the hardest part about this whole thing because that’s your children,” she said about the negative comments she sees about Beyoncé and Solange—whom she shares with ex Matthew Knowles—across social media.  “We talked about protection. You want to protect them. You can’t because you can’t fight the whole internet.”

And her Grammy-winning daughters have made it clear they don’t want the outside noise to bring her down, down, down, down, down. 

“My kids are like ,‘Mom, don’t you answer those crazy people. Just ignore them,’” she continued. “And I can to a certain degree but sometimes it just gets to be too much. And then I have to say what I say and be done with it.”

Mama Tina is OK when it comes to her oldest girls, but she does draw a line when it comes to her grandchildren which include, Blue Ivy, 12, Sir and Rumi Carter, 7—Bey’s kids with Jay-Z—and Solange’s son Juelz Smith, 19, with ex-husband Daniel Smith. 

“I take it with a grain of salt most of the time,” she emphasized. “It depends. You mess with my grandchildren, though, I’m coming. Because they’re minors, and they didn’t ask to be in this. I have gotten on and let people have a piece of my mind several times, but I take a lot and then there’s certain things that I just have to draw the line on.”