Michelle Obama Defends Spanking Her 2 Kids in Jaw-Dropping Confession

Michelle Obama is opening up about the way she handled discipline while raising her daughters, and she is not pretending parenting was always simple.

During the Tuesday, July 7, episode of the “IMO” podcast, which she cohosts with her brother, Craig Robinson, the former first lady sat down with comedian Wanda Sykes for a wide-ranging conversation that eventually turned to parenting.

Obama asked Sykes whether she had ever dealt with the “spanking, no spanking” debate in her own home.

“Did you go through the spanking, no spanking thing?” Obama asked the Emmy-winning comedian.

Sykes said her family has a “no spanking” policy, though she joked that one of her children sometimes tested the limits of that rule.

“Sometimes you need more than words,” Sykes quipped.

Obama agreed that discipline is not the same for every child, saying parents often have to figure out what works depending on the kid.

“I always thought kids should know what a spanking is, because you can’t threaten something they don’t know, right?” Obama said.

The former first lady, who shares daughters Malia, 28, and Sasha, 25, with former President Barack Obama, said her girls were quick to understand consequences.

“I had two girls, and girls are pretty bright,” she explained. “One little pop, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t pleasant.’ It wasn’t pleasant for me either. It hurt me as much as it hurt them.”

Obama said that once her daughters understood what a spanking was, the idea of it became more of a warning than something she had to actually do.

“But then it just became a good threat,” she said. “‘Don’t make me…’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, probably that’s not necessary.’ But I do believe that every now and then…”

Robinson then asked his sister whether they had experienced corporal punishment growing up.

“Oh yeah,” Obama replied. “I didn’t get many. Neither of us got many. The belt, jump rope with the handles.”

Although Obama said she once believed spanking had a place in discipline, she has also spoken before about why she eventually stopped using it with her daughters.

During a 2025 episode of her podcast, Obama admitted that she began to feel uncomfortable with it.

“I felt silly,” she said at the time. “It took a couple of spankings for me to be like, yeah, you know what, this is a little kid and the fact that I can’t think of any better way to get my point across than to smack somebody on the b—, I felt embarrassed.”

Still, Obama said she believes some old-school parenting boundaries should make a comeback.

“I want to be a proponent for reinstating some of the stuff that we had,” she said. “When kids say ‘I hate my mom,’ it’s like, you better say that in your head, in your room. You don’t say that out loud.”

Obama said she believes some parents today are too afraid to set firm rules, and she thinks that has created problems for a younger generation.

“Parents are too afraid to set those kinds of boundaries,” she said. “And I think that’s also part of the challenge that we’re facing in this generation.”

The author also talked about the importance of letting children make mistakes and learn from them, instead of trying to control every part of their lives.

“I think nowadays a lot of parents are trying to live their kids’ lives for them so that they don’t make any mistakes and don’t feel any sense of failure which keeps them from learning,” Obama said.

She said raising children also means eventually trusting them to use the lessons they have been taught.

“I raised you to have some sense, to have judgment,” Obama said. “And at some point, you’ve got to practice that, which means that I’ve got to let go.”

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