Michelle Obama felt "embarrassed" whenever she spanked her children.
The 61-year-old former First Lady - has who has Malia, 26, and Sasha, 23 with her husband Barack Obama - admitted that it didn't take long after she became a mother to realise that she just "felt silly" whenever she would physically punish her daughters so decided to stop doing it altogether.
Speaking on her 'IMO' podcast, she explained: "I felt silly. 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 butt, I felt embarrassed."
The 'Becoming' author also opined that that parents are "too afraid to set boundaries" these days and thinks that is proving to be a "challenge" for the current generation of children.
She said: "I want to be a proponent for reinstating some of the stuff that we had.
"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. You know, parents are too afraid to set those kinds of boundaries. And I think that’s also part of the challenge that we’re facing in this generation.
"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.
"I raised you to have some sense, to have judgment. And at some point, you’ve got to practice that, which means that I've got to let go."
Michelle recently opened up on the struggle the high profile parents had with keeping their daughters' personal lives out of the spotlight, and she described it as "a lot of work".
Speaking on SixiusXM's 'Let's Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa', she recalled: "They had to drive and they had to go to prom and they were on teams and they traveled to other schools and they had to do college searches, and they went to parties and they had drinks, and they tried out smoking and they did all the things.
"And every weekend was a nightmare, because we had to work to make sure that them being regular teenagers didn't wind up on Page Six."
