Michelle Obama gives us Excellent Tips on Parenting

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 08: Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey during Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour presented by WW (Weight Watchers Reimagined) at Barclays Center on February 08, 2020 in New York, New York. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

If you’ve read “Becoming” (or have just heard her speak), you’ll know that Michelle Obama has a well of knowledge to teach from, and she continues to.

Michelle sat with Oprah for the Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus tour, and she spoke about a little about, well, everything, People shared.

She shared the advice she gives her daughters, and we think it’s a great parenting tip. She said:

What I tell them is what I continue to tell themselves is that they have to walk their own walk. They cannot define themselves by looking at each other or looking at me or their dad. They have to take the time to get to know themselves — give themselves a moment to figure out who they want to be in the world, not who they think I want them to be, not what the rest of the world says about them, but to really think about how they want to shape their lives and how they want to move in this world. So, I don’t want them measuring themselves by external influences, and for young girls that is hard to do.

Michelle Obama also discussed not following her daughters, Sasha and Malia on social media. “It’s better for them to be checked by somebody younger than me,” she shared.

She said that when they were kids she was hands-on, checked on where they were going and who they were going to see. But now that they are college-aged, she’s letting them make their own decisions. (Nigerian parents, what do you think?)

And what about parenting while being married? Michelle Obama had some insight to share on that, too. She said:

Parenting takes up a lot of emotional space. Raising a family together is a hard thing. It takes a toll. But if you’re with the person, if you know why you are with them. You understand that there was a friendship and a foundation there.

You can have chunks of hard bad times and if that’s how you define your marriage by just the hard times, then you’ll miss the truth of what’s really there.

We, too, are dying to know what kind of father Barack Obama is, and Michelle is letting us know he’s quite the emotional one.

He has a “ugly loud cry,” she said.

We bawl like babies.

When the emotions come is when we are getting in our cars and getting on a plane and leaving our babies,” the former first lady said. “They’re going somewhere where they now live. That’s when it hits you. It’s like we all start choking up.