Former first lady Michelle Obama said she stopped spanking her daughters when they were growing up because it made her feel “silly.”
Obama said she spanked Malia and Sasha — now 26 and 23 — a few times before she felt that it wasn’t an effective way to discipline them, and the corporal punishment made her feel “embarrassed” as a parent.
“I felt silly,” she said in a candid conversation about parenting with Damon and Marlon Wayans on Wednesday’s episode of her IMO podcast with her brother, Craig Robinson.
“It took a couple of spankings for me to be like, yeah, you know what?” she recalled. “I felt like, you know, 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 still considers herself a tough-love parent who let her kids fail.
Obama said she feels too many parents today “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.”
“I want to be a proponent for reinstating some of the stuff that we had,” she said. “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.”
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