Sterling K. Brown is highlighting how race factors into parenting.

On Monday’s episode of “Armchair Expert,” the Emmy-winner told host Dax Shepard that although he respects that the podcaster and his wife, actor Kristen Bell, have made the decision to keep their kids’ faces off social media, Brown has a totally different perspective.

Bell and Shepard typically include their kids in social media posts, but always blur or block out their faces to preserve their anonymity. Brown and his wife, actor Ryan Michelle Bathe, do not block their kids’ faces.

Brown and Bathe share two sons, 14-year-old Andrew and 10-year-old Amaré. Shepard and Bell share two daughters, 12-tear-old Lincoln and 11-year-old Delta.

“I agree and understand exactly what you’re saying,” Brown said of Shepard’s desire to give his kids privacy. “And it’s interesting because you have two girls. I have two boys. Your children are obviously white. My children are Black. I feel like the more I put them on social, the safer they are.”

The “This is Us” alum continued: “Any proximity that Black boys can have to some sort of celebrity or access or whatnot—”

“Status, leverage—” Shepard interjected.

“I’m like, I’m trying to make sure that they make it home,” Brown said. “That’s really it.”

“That makes a ton of sense,” Shepard said in response.

Earlier in the episode, Shepard went into detail about why he keeps his daughters’ faces off social media — and, interestingly, cited “safety” as the reason as well.

“My thing is number one is safety,” Shepard said. “I don’t want you to know what my daughters look like… I don’t want them to be famous. I want them to be anonymous and make mistakes and not be in tabloids cause they were at a nightclub and everyone knows them. I want them to be able to fuck up and be completely anonymous.”

Bell also cited safety as a concern when she explained her and Shepard’s parenting boundary on Instagram in 2019, “If we expose our kids’ faces, there is a real threat of them getting stalked, or of a stranger coming up to them and knowing their name. It’s a safety thing.”

It should also be noted that Black boys tend to be affected by adultification bias — or the perception that they’re much older than they actually are. The American Psychological Association published research in 2014 that found that Black boys as young as 10 years old are often seen as less innocent than their white peers of the same age.

Shepard’s podcast co-host Monica Padman seemed particularly stunned by Brown’s revelation about featuring his kids more prominently on social media.

“I’m going to be thinking about that for so long,” Padman admitted. “Just that subtle difference between two people, who are very similar, in the exact same situation in so many ways, except for one very specific way, and how that manifests is so wild—”

“It’s heartbreaking, actually,” Shepard said.

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