Michelle Obama recently got real about her parenting strategies.
Chatting with guests actor and comedian brothers Damon and Marlon Wayans on the IMO podcast she hosts with her brother, Craig Robinson, Obama shared stories about mothering Malia and Sasha throughout their childhood and adolescence—including the couple of times she disciplined them by spanking.
“I hit my kids one time and I cried like a baby because I was like, ‘I can’t do that to them,’” said Marlon, dad to Shawn and Kai, now 23 and 24.
“I was the same way,” Obama said. “And I felt silly. It took a couple of spankings for me to like, 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.”
As they got older, and moved from needing discipline to advice, Obama and the Wayan brothers admitted there came a time when their kids didn’t want to hear their opinions on anything in their lives.
“I realize at a certain age, they don’t want to hear what you’re saying,” said Damon, father of four grown kids: Damon Jr., Michael, Kara, and Kyla. For example, he said, criticizing who your child chooses to date could backfire.
“If you say something about someone’s boyfriend, then you’re attacking their ability to pick someone for themselves. So they defend them. They hold on and they fight,” he said. “But if you just step back, then they’re going to see what I see, and they’ll see it quicker.”
Marlon—who later discussed how learning that his child Kai was transgender taught him “what unconditional love was”—said that his philosophy, similarly, was always: “I’m not going to be the obstacle in your way.”
Obama agreed that the stage of a child not wanting to hear a parent’s opinion “comes pretty early.” And early is exactly when a parent should be stepping back to let kids make their own poor choices, “so they can learn from their own mistakes,” she said.
“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,” Obama said. Instead, she always tried to think, “You know, I raised y’all 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.”
Even in the White House, she continued, her approach was to give her girls lots of freedom to figure themselves out.
“Everybody’s trying to hold onto their kids, but one day they’re going to get out there,” the former FLOTUS said. “And the only thing that is for certain for kids getting out in the world is they’re gonna get hit with some failure. That’s the only thing that’s guaranteed.”
So, she shared, “we’ve got to start preparing them early for that, letting them practice making their own decisions—you know, choosing the knucklehead boyfriend and holding your tongue and showing them that you trust them so that when they do fail, they’ll come back.”
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