Kamala Harris tells Call Her Daddy podcast what her mom taught her about ‘agency and autonomy’

Kamala Harris attributed everything she knows about “agency” to her mom during her October 6 interview with popular podcast Call Her Daddy.

The vice president and Democratic presidential nominee joined podcast host Alex Cooper in Washington DC for an unfiltered interview where they talked about her upbringing as well as sexual assault, abortion rights, and criticisms against her.

Harris discussed her childhood growing up with two divorced parents and being primarily raised by her mom, Shyamala Gopalan Harris. When asked by Cooper what “values” her mom “instilled” in her, she said she learned the importance of expressing her emotions.

“My mother definitely impressed upon us the importance of being able to express how we were feeling,” Harris told Cooper.

“And a lot of it, I think, was her teaching us that we had agency, and so, that things don’t just happen to you,” she said. “So, think about how you’re feeling, not just as a way to dump, but also as a way to kind of figure out where you are in a moment and center yourself.”

The former prosecutor explained how when she was in her late teens and early twenties, her mom wouldn’t accept that her problems weren’t in some way self-inflicted.

She noted: “I’m telling you, every time I came home with a problem, if I came home with a problem, the first thing that my mother would do is she would look at me… My mother, the first thing (she would say), ‘What did you do.’”

Harris believed other parents would coddle their children. This wasn’t the case in her household.

“But here’s the thing that I realized, she was actually teaching me, ‘Think about where you had agency in that moment and think about what you had the choice to do or not do,’” she explained.

She said she learned