Why Is Michelle Obama Always Authentic? Discover 5 Parenting Tips From Her Unflappable Mum
It’s all about raising adults rather than kids, according to ‘Becoming’.
Growing up isn’t easy, but supportive parents can give you wings.
One day, my two best friends excluded me from a game. I came home full of repressed frustration, and my mum gently unfurled my pent-up feelings. When she realized what had happened, she calmly painted my options and told me to work out which road to walk.
It’s funny how I can’t remember what I did next, but I can recall how she made me feel. By staying unflappable and not judging, she took the sting out of my day and taught me a life lesson in how to approach drama with a sense of calm. Just how I imagine Michelle Obama’s mum would have handled it.
Fed up with parenting manuals? Try this memoir instead
Becoming-Michelle Obama’s memoir is full of life lessons. The iconic former First Lady shares her inspirational life story and explores how her happy childhood filled her with ambition. In her brilliant voice, she describes her mum’s parenting techniques that are too good not to share. But first, let me give you some context.
Always striving — from humble beginnings to Princeton
Michelle Obama was born in the South Side of Chicago in 1964, daughter of Fraser Robinson III, Democratic precinct captain and city water plant employee, and Marian Shields Robinson, first homemaker, then secretary.
Her home life was conventional, with her father working and her mum staying home to raise Michelle and her older brother Craig. In ‘Becoming’, she describes a happy childhood, albeit against a backdrop of shifting politics, with the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and the blazing war in Vietnam. She writes:
‘None of this really registered with me. I was just a kid, a girl with Barbies and blocks, with two parents and an older brother who slept each night with his head about three feet from mine. My family was my world, my everything.’
Coping with illness
A great sadness in Michelle’s life was her father’s Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. Although he didn’t dwell on it, she noticed his limp increase when she was young.
Chicago's white flight
Michelle starting kindergarten coincided with the white flight in Chicago, made painfully clear when Michelle compares her class photo in Kindergarten-a racially diverse mix of middle-class families versus her 5th-grade class picture, left without diversity. In 1950, her neighborhood was 96 percent white, compared to 1981 when it had changed to 96% black. She tells the Chicago Suntimes.
“We were doing everything we were supposed to do — and better,” she said as she discussed witnessing a painful chapter in Chicago’s history. “But when we moved in, white families moved out.”
Her community wasn’t the only one where white families upped sticks, one by one, to the (whiter) suburbs. From 1960 to 1980, the white population in Englewood- another Chicago neighborhood- “plummeted over 98% from 51,583 to 818,”. Shockingly, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans didn’t even achieve this level of turnover.
The teen years
Michelle commuted to a highly ranked (public) high school with a substantial (80%) percentage of nonwhite students. She applied herself and befriended Santita Jackson-Reverend Jackson’s daughter, often getting caught up in political rallies, where Michelle felt like a fish out of water. A sign of things to come?
Despite her achievements, a college counselor dismissed Michelle as not being Princetown material. However, imbued with her parents’ confidence, she didn’t let it deter her and applied to join Craig at the Ivy League University.
How Michelle’s mum raised adults rather than babies
According to Michelle, Marian Robinson loves her children dearly, but, unlike modern parents, she didn’t overmanage them. She was raising adults, not babies. This, Michelle believes, is how she instilled such strong values into her children, offering her children guidelines rather than rules. So how did she and her father imbue values?
- Michelle’s parents reminded Craig and Michelle that context exists.
They told their kids to be tolerant of everyone’s unseen history. For instance, they explained the harrowing backstory of their grouchy great aunt and piano teacher, Robbie, when Michelle complained about her
- Her mum took her children's concerns seriously and acted upon them.
The neighborhood degeneration resulted in mayhem in Michelle’s classroom, causing Michelle to complain to her mother. Her mother listened patiently and lobbied the school to move the brighter kids to a different classroom with a competent teacher.
- Michelle’s mum expected her children to ‘own their smartness’.
Both parents expected their kids to transcend and created an environment to do so. They had bought them a dictionary and an expensive Encyclopedia set, and they drilled them to speak correctly.
- Her mum didn’t sugarcoat the truth.
When a policeman accused Craig of stealing his brand new bike, their parents told them the incident was unjust but common, unfortunately.
- Michelle and Craig were responsible for their own decisions.
Both kids didn’t have curfews as teenagers. Instead, their parents would ask them what they would find a reasonable time to be home and expect them to stick to it. She painted options and expected her children to choose wisely, just like my mum.
Listen to what Michelle's mum says about her daughter
Interested in imbuing solid values in your children?
Try these tips:
- Teach your children empathy- by explaining why people act a certain way, you can teach them to be tolerant.
- Take your children’s worries seriously, and don’t dismiss their concerns.
- Create an environment for them to thrive-have books around and answer their endless questions respectfully.
- Be open and honest about serious matters (age-appropriately).
- Try not to be helicopter parents to your growing kids, but be pragmatic and give them guidelines rather than rules.
Final words
Michelle Obama is widely admired for always being authentic. She attributes her ambitions to the secure and happy childhood she received and the values instilled by her parents.
In Becoming, she tells how her unflappable mum brought her up by treating her as an adult-she needed to push out in the world and thus raised her to believe in herself.
Parents can do the same by following the five techniques, as outlined above. So let’s give our children wings, just like Michelle’s and my mum did.
More by the same author:
Further reading:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38746485-becominghttps://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/white-flight-by-the-numbers/1951412/https://interactive.wttw.com/dusable-to-obama/bronzeville