We’re huge fans of Marian Robinson, former first grandma and Michelle Obama’s mother. She’s full of wisdom, so when she shares her hack for answering kids’ difficult questions, our ears perk up. Once they pose the often tricky question, don’t freak out. Instead, count to ten to give yourself pause before you react.
Ms. Robinson says, “I decided I didn’t have to answer right away. So, when you count to ten, you give yourself a chance to calm down with this question and you think. And then, before you know it, you’re not even answering it. You’re having a conversation with this person. You know, why do you think you should do that? Or did you think about doing so and so. But it’s funny how parents think they have to know all the answers, and nobody knows all the answers. And, I was very comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know.'”
Quite ahead of her time, Ms. Robinson mentions examining how she was raised and wanting things to be different with her own children. She discusses “not feeling good” when “people thought maybe I didn’t have sense enough to have an opinion.” So, instead of merely praising or correcting behavior like most parents from previous generations, she wanted to have conversations with her children. She even asked that her children question her. Ms. Robinson said, “Our discipline was really just conversation.”
Ms. Robinson believes in really getting to know your kids, which naturally happens anyway when conversing with them so much. She chuckles at the parenting books that her own daughter read and said, “But, the best thing to do is play it by ear.” She elaborates by saying it requires getting to know each individual child and finding out what they need from their parents.
Read the whole transcript to learn more parenting gems from Ms. Robinson from this episode of The Michelle Obama Podcast
