Maria Shriver Made Her Kids Stand Up ‘Out of Respect’ Whenever She Entered a Room — and Says They Still Do

“Even though my kids moaned and groaned about it, they now say it was a good thing,” the journalist said

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Published on January 8, 2025 12:42PM EST

Maria Shriver made sure her kids had good manners. 

The journalist, 69, opened up about raising her kids with one major rule she inherited from her own mother in a special episode of Hoda Kotb’s podcast Making Space, filmed live at the Making Space Wellness Weekend in Austin, Texas. 

When Kotb, 60, brought up a previous conversation with Shriver, in which she said she makes her children and their friends “stand up” when she comes home, the author replied, “I make them stand up. I used to make them. Now they just do stand up.”

She went on to explain that it was a rule her own mother, Eunice Kennedy, had when she was growing up.

“There’s many things that I’ve emulated from my mother, but my grandmother and my mother were big on manners,” Shriver said. “So when somebody who was older walked in the room, aka my mother, everybody stood up.”

She recalled, “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?'”

She continued, “You could be 10, 11, 19, 20, but you had to like step up.”

Shriver, a mother of four, said she wanted her kids to have the same values. 

“I wanted my kids to… 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 explained. “So when their friends would come over, I’d be like, ahem.”

Shriver added that she didn’t want her kids or their friends to be “sitting looking at a phone or watching the game” upon her entrance. 

“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.

Shriver shares four children with ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger: daughters Katherine, 35, and Christina, 33, and sons Patrick, 31, and Christopher, 27.