First Enforcer! Michelle Reveals She & Barack Obama 'Threaten' Daughters To Keep Them In Line, Take 'Great Joy In Embarrassing Them'
May 1 2015, Updated 7:08 p.m. ET
Michelle Obama carefully guards her daughter's privacy but in a revealing new interview, she explained how she and President Barack Obama keep them in line — by threatening to embarrass them as often as possible!
The First Lady opened up about her children, Malia, 16, and Sasha, 13, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight's Kevin Frazier.
"Barack and I take great joy in embarrassing our children," she said. "We threaten them with jealousy. Sometimes when you see me whispering to the kids in a crowd I'm telling them, 'Sit up straight or I'm going to embarrass you. I'm going to start dancing' and they're like, 'Mom, no, please don't, stop.' But we get that. Our kids are as humiliated by us as the next, but they take it in good stride. They put up with us."
Michelle, 51, admitted that her children are spending less and less time in the White House these days and joked that their departure for college will be particularly hard on the President.
"The beauty is that teenagers help you along because the older they get the less they want to be bothered with you," she explained. "So Barack and I spend most weekends staring at each other because somebody's at a basketball game, somebody's at a dance, somebody's sleeping over. We're the last people our kids want to be with so I think they're conditioning us for that empty nest syndrome. But we're not relishing that at all. I don't know what we're going to do. I've got to get him some more hobbies."
Taking the Tiger Mom syndrome to the extreme, The First Mom revealed her plot to keep an eye on the girls once they head out on their own.
"I threaten that I'm going to buy an apartment near their campuses and I'm going to come visit them and sit in their classes but that's an idle threat," she joked.
However, the Princeton and Harvard Law graduate explained that she is hopeful for her girls' future.
"I've spent my children's entire lives raising them to be independent, confident, young women who are ready to build great lives for themselves and to see them take each step," she said. "Education has always been at the foundation of the messages that we have in our household and it was there for us, me and Barack, even though our parents didn't have resources, college was a part of that independence. So, we're going to celebrate that and I'm going to be happy to see them thriving on campuses and doing work-study jobs and traveling and having all these wonderful independent experiences that are going to make them phenomenal people."
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