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Julia Louis-Dreyfus, 64, has a foolproof way to reel adult kids back home.
During an appearance on Wednesday’s episode of the “IMO” podcast hosted by Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, Louis-Dreyfus shared a household hack she used to get her adult kids to visit more often.
“You just make sure that after they leave, all the sheets on their bed are high-quality sheets, and that bed is the most comfortable bed they ever slept in in their life, and they’ll always come back,” Louis-Dreyfus told podcast hosts Obama and Robinson.
Louis-Dreyfus married her husband, Brad Hall, in 1987. They welcomed their first son, Henry, in 1992 and their second son, Charlie, in 1997.
Obama echoed her sentiments, saying that she and her husband, Barack Obama, have made their home intentionally hard to resist.
“We, Barack and I, we are all about creating what we call the attractive nuisance. We want to make it so that you want to be back here,” Obama said.
Now that her daughters, Malia and Sasha, are older, Obama says they’ve started staying longer.
“There’s that period when they just leave in their early 20s, and they’re just like, ‘Bye, see ya. We’re living our lives, and we’re so happy to be sleeping on a dirty mattress in college.’ And they’re just now getting to the point where they hang around a little couple of days longer because the tub is clean,” Obama said.
“There are bath salts. Things smell good. There’s a lot of stuff in the fridge,” Louis-Dreyfus added.
Obama and Louis-Dreyfus aren’t the only ones who have spoken about dealing with empty-nest syndrome.
Gwyneth Paltrow previously said that she thinks of herself and her husband, TV producer Brad Falchuk, as “free birds,” instead of “empty-nesters.”
“Empty nest is so demoralizing,” Paltrow said, “but if you say we’re free birds and you embody that, then you have this much more energized, optimistic” perspective.
Brooke Shields previously said that high rents in New York City might keep her two college-age daughters coming home to their family apartment in Manhattan more often.
“And by the way, the cost of living just in this city is so prohibitive anyway that it may work in my favor,” Shields said. “Maybe I’ll start charging them rent though. That might be a good idea.”
Representatives for Obama and Louis-Dreyfus did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.
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