Maria Shriver gleaned at least one solid parenting tip from her late mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
The author and entrepreneur recently joined TODAY’s Hoda Kotb at the Making Space Wellness Weekend in Texas. In a conversation that’s featured in the Jan. 8 episode of Hoda’s podcast, “Making Space,” Shriver recalled the one mannerism she instilled in her children after watching her own mother over the years.
Hoda remembered Shriver told her that her children stand up when she enters a room.
“I make them stand up,” Shriver said. “I used to make them. Now they just do stand up.”
Shriver, a mother of four, went on to explain that the practice is something she previously watched her own mother do.
“There’s many things that I’ve emulated from my mother, but my grandmother and my mother were big on manners. So, you know, when somebody who was older walked in the room, aka my mother, everybody stood up,” she noted.
Shriver then described how this piece of etiquette also extended to conversations in her household.
“When we went to the dinner table, everybody had to have something to bring to the table to talk about, to converse about. My mother would be like, ‘What’s your opinion of the gospel? What’s your opinion of what the president said today?’ And you could be 10, 11, 19, 20, but you had to like step up,” she said.
When she became a mother herself, Shriver was intentional about teaching her children to respect others.
“I wanted my kids to, you know, when I walked in the room, or their dad walked in the room, or you would walk in the room, that they stand up out of respect,” she said.
Shriver also sought to instill a sense of respect in her kids’ friends when they came over to her house.
“I didn’t want to walk in the room, and they’d be sitting looking at a phone or watching the game. I’d be like, ‘I’m here. Here we are, and here I am. And look me in the eye, say hello, thank me for coming, write me a thank you note if I take you somewhere.’ That sort of stuff. And even though my kids moaned and groaned about it, they now say it was a good thing,” she said.
Shiver shares two daughters, Katherine, 35, and Christina, 33, and two sons, Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27, with ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger.
While talking about her parenting style, Shriver said her own childhood as a member of a famous family helped inform the way she parented her own children.