Michelle Obama said the reason she stopped spanking her daughters when they were young was that she “felt embarrassed”.
The former First Lady was talking about parenting on a recent episode of her IMO podcast with guests Damon and Marlon Wayans.
Obama has two daughters, Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23, with her husband, former US president Barack Obama.
The conversation touched on methods of disciplining children and Obama said she used to spank her daughters before she realised it “embarrassed” her.
“I felt silly,” she said. “It took a couple of spankings for me to be like, yeah, you know what, this is a little kid and the fact that I can’t think of any better way to get my point across than to smack somebody on the butt, I felt embarrassed.”
She was still strict with her daughters, though, even if she did not use corporal punishment to discipline them.
“I want to be a proponent for reinstating some of the stuff that we had,” Obama continued. “When kids say ‘I hate my mom’, it’s like, you better say that in your head, in your room. You don’t say that out loud. You know, parents are too afraid to set those kinds of boundaries. And I think that’s also part of the challenge that we’re facing in this generation.”
She also spoke about teaching her children to have “sense and judgement” and how it was important for them to learn from making their own mistakes.
“I think nowadays a lot of parents are trying to live their kids’ lives for them so that they don’t make any mistakes and don’t feel any sense of failure which keeps them from learning,” she said.
“I raised you to have some sense, to have judgment. And at some point, you’ve got to practice that, which means that I’ve got to let go.”
Recently, Obama opened up about the “nightmare” of trying to keep the teenage antics of Malia and Sasha out of the public eye during her husband’s presidency. Malia and Sasha were 10 and 7, respectively, when their father took the US presidency in 2009. They lived a large part of their teenage years in the White House during Obama’s second term, which ended in January 2017.
“They had to drive and they had to go to prom and they were on teams and they travelled to other schools and they had to do college searches and they went to parties and they had drinks and they tried out smoking and they did all the things,” she said.
“Every weekend was a nightmare, because we had to work to make sure that them being regular teenagers didn’t wind up on Page Six.”
