Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn’t afraid to teach his kids a lesson — but the punishment didn’t always fit the crime.
Schwarzenegger, 76, reflected on his parenting style during the Monday, October 2, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
“For the way I grew up, I was lenient. But I think for American standards, probably strict,” Schwarzenegger explained.
The Terminator actor joked that there are a few anecdotes that his kids “bring up most often” about their childhoods.
“My son, for instance, did not make his bed. He had the nanny make the bed, which was not allowed,” Schwarzenegger recalled, explaining that he expected all of his kids to make their own beds, clean their own bathrooms and wash their own clothes.
After noticing that his son Patrick’s bed was a little too perfectly made one morning, Schwarzenegger “opened up the doors, grabbed the mattress and threw it off the balcony down into the swimming pool.”
“He had to kind of drag it up, the mattress and the pillows — I threw everything out there,” Schwarzenegger added as the audience and host Jimmy Kimmel erupted into laughter.
Another incident involved one of Schwarzenegger’s daughters. “My daughter would have this habit of taking her tennis shoes off and leaving them right there by the fireplace,” he revealed. “I said, ‘I’m not going to go and be a servant here.’”
He laughed as he continued: “The third time I said, ‘OK look, I’ve told you now for three times, I told you I’m going to burn the shoes’ … so I took the shoes and I put them in the fireplace.”
Schwarzenegger told one final tale about one of his sons, who “just loved to leave the lights on” in the house.
“I grew up where there was a shortage of electricity after the Second World War in Austria so I said we had to always turn off the lights,” he explained.
After noticing his son’s pattern, Schwarzenegger threatened to remove one light bulb from his seven-bulb chandelier every time he noticed that the lights had been left on.
“Come day seven, now it was dark and he was five years old and he was freaking out going alone into his room at night when it was dark,” Schwarzenegger remembered. “So I said, ‘What do we do now? How do we solve this?’”
His son promised to turn the lights off going forward, so Schwarzenegger put the light bulbs back and “from that point on he always turned off the lights.”
“It’s a good lesson,” Kimmel chimed in as the audience laughed and applauded.
Schwarzenegger shares four children — Katherine, 33, Christina, 32, Patrick, 30, and Christopher, 26 — with ex-wife Maria Shriver. The former couple were married from 1986 to 2021. Schwarzenegger is also the father of son Joseph, 26, whom he welcomed with former housekeeper Mildred Baena. His family has expanded further with granddaughters Lyla Maria, 3, and Eloise Christina, 16 months, whom Katherine shares with husband Chris Pratt.
