“I was raised very, very different,” he said on Today With Hoda & Jenna in May 2023. “South — dad just, ‘Touch that again, you’re going to get a whipping’ sort of situation and we don’t spank Evy, so it’s one of those gentle kind of things, but having to learn where to be strong, where to be firm, but not in the way I was.”
In fact, being a single parent and a girl dad inspired Channing’s children book series, The One and Only Sparkella.
“I was looking up YouTube on how to braid hair,” he explained regarding the series’ origin. “Like, I didn’t want to be the dad that was just delivering a kid to school looking like she had just slept on the street.”
“This series of books kind of came from that,” he continued. “It was really trying to figure out how to talk to a little girl.”
