Michelle Obama shares why it’s essential to show kids ‘gladness’

She added that there are a lot of kids who can live their whole life and not be received with gladness. “I just think, man, if this interaction is their chance to be seen by somebody and somebody that they think is important, I’m not gonna squander it,” Michelle said, adding that for the majority of their lives, children see adults as role models – something that a lot of parents tend to forget.

“Sometimes you will attack them like they’re grown up — you shoo them out of your store, you treat them like they don’t belong in a museum, they are nuisances. And as adults, showing them that leaves a mark on them,” she explained.

She went on to say that she is now “on the other side of parenting”. She recalled her daughter walking into her hotel room wearing wrinkled clothes. “She walks in, maybe the second time I saw her this morning, and I was like ‘you’re wrinkly, you’re gonna do something about this’ and she was like ‘yeah mom.’ And then I thought, ‘I did it.’ I greeted her with, instead of what I felt, which is, ‘sit on my lap, give me a kiss,’ I’m fixing things. I’m pointing out, ‘oh my god your hair is not right here’,” Michelle said.

This isn’t the first time that she has opened up about motherhood and parenting. Prior to this, she had shared her experiences with her mom’s guilt in her book. “One tiny thing would go wrong, and my mother guilt would kick in. I’d start second-guessing every choice Barack and I had ever made. Self-scrutiny is something women are programmed to excel at, having been thrust into systems of inequality and fed fully unrealistic images of female ‘perfection’ from the time we were kids ourselves. None of us – truly none – ever live up,” she wrote, adding that for mothers, the feelings of “not-enoughness” can be especially acute.

She added: “The images of maternal perfection we encounter in advertisements and across social media are often no less fake than what we see on the enhanced and Photoshopped female bodies that are so often upheld as the societal gold standard for beauty. But still, we are conditioned to buy into it, questing after not just the perfect body, but also perfect children, perfect work-life balances, perfect family experiences, and perfect levels of patience. It’s hard not to look around as a mother and think, Is everyone doing this perfectly but me?”

Michelle Obama shares two daughters – Malia and Sasha – with Barack Obama, the former US President.

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