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Pregnant Serena Williams Shares the Advice Her Mom Gave About Being a Parent

Practice makes perfect! Serena Williams, who is expecting her first child with fiancé Alexis Ohanian, shared some of the helpful parenting advice that she learned from her mother, Oracene Price.

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“It’s interesting because my mom has always been so strong for me and she’s been the woman that has just literally been unbreakable, someone that I always looked up to and all my sisters looked up to,” the tennis pro, 35, said during her keynote address at a BlogHer conference in Orlando on Friday, June 23.

Serena Williams
Serena Williams attends ‘Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art of the In-Between’ Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on May 1, 2017.

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“So, in the midst of having a child, it’s like all of the sudden you start thinking about the lessons your parents taught you, especially my mom,” Williams continued. “And you start thinking about, ‘Wow, what do I want to raise my kid as?’ And when you’re young and you’re growing up you think your parents may be strict. Then you realize when you’re older and you’re like, could they have been a little stricter? Or should I have done this more?”

Serena Williams and Oracene Price
Serena Williams and her mother, Oracene Price, pose with the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen trophy in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris on June 8, 2013.

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The 23-time Grand Slam winner explained that her mother, who is a tennis coach, helped her become the powerful woman she is today. “I feel like all those lessons [my mom] taught me about being so strong, of proud of who I am, of being able to look anyone in the face and have confidence and speak with so much confidence is something that I really have been able to embrace,” she said. “And I would love to teach my kid that.”

Williams accidentally revealed the news of her first pregnancy on Snapchat in April when she posted a photo of herself showing off her baby bump at 20 weeks. “On social media you press the wrong button and … 30 minutes later I missed four calls,” she said at a TED conference on April 25. “This was the one time it slipped.”

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