Those parents have gone from reviewing the president-elect's Cabinet choices to invoking him at the dinner table to motivate a recalcitrant child, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

"It's the third-party thing," said Jill Miller Zimon, a freelance writer and mother of three. "With kids, lots of times when a child won't do something for you, you will ... pretend a third party said it was a good thing to do."

Avis Jones-DeWeever, a mother of two and director of research at the National Council of Negro Women, bought her children a book about Obama's childhood.

"I tell them all the time, 'You are brilliant, but brilliance necessitates hard work to get to the level he reached,'" Jones-DeWeever said.

In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama describes how his mother dealt with him when he tried to avoid studying.

"She would patiently repeat her most powerful defense: 'This is no picnic for me either, buster,'" Obama wrote.