Paris Hilton is just following in her mom's attention seeking footsteps!

Paris Hilton has presented her mom with an unusual mother's day gift - 45 days in the slammer.

But it seems that the hotel heiress has inherited those attention seeking antics from her mother, Kathy Hilton.

Kathy has always longed for publicity for herself and her daughters, and even turned Paris's courtroom tragedy last week into a photo opportunity.

When weepy Paris was sentenced to 45 days in jail for violating her probation, it was her mother who became a media magnet herself.

She laughed in the courtroom when a city prosecutor argued that Paris deserved jail time and when a judge announced the sentence, Mama Hilton blurted out, "May I have your autograph?" She also shared her feelings with reporters and took the centre stage outside the court.

"This is pathetic and disgusting, a waste of taxpayer money with all this nonsense. This is a joke," the Mirror quoted Kathy, as saying.

While her media coverage doesn't match up to her well-known daughter, Kathy Hilton is not alien to the limelight. She was a guest star on "Happy Days" in 1977 and appeared on "The Rockford Files" in '78.

It is Kathy who has made Paris what she is today, pushing her daughter into the spotlight from the start, firm that her eldest child would attain the megastar standing she had never managed.

Kathy carefully trained Paris and her younger sister Nicky for a life of reputation and fame.

"Kathy was absolutely pushy, arrogant, condescending and presumptuous and Paris picked that up from her. The spotlight always had to be on Kathy. It was always, 'Do you know who I am?'" said Peggy Cusack Yakovlev, a former personal assistant to Kathy's husband Rick's uncle, Eric Hilton.

Kathy initiated her daughters into the gracious society of celebrities, guiding Paris through her first appearance as a child model at charity events before making her sign Donald Trump's modelling agency at 19.

"Kathy wanted to expose her girls to the social and nightlife world in Manhattan. She wanted her girls to be in the limelight - and she certainly accomplished that," Gini Tangalakis, the mother of an old schoolfriend of Paris's sister Nicky, said.

Kathy supported Paris even during her most infamous and disreputable controversies, claiming that her daughter could do nothing wrong.

When a homemade sex tape called "One Night in Paris" surfaced on the Internet, Hilton characterized her daughter as a victim.

Now, as Paris is set for the prison term, Kathy is fiercely defending her first-born.

"She's eccentric, she's herself and she never hurts anybody. It upsets me that she gets taken advantage of, but I think we've all learned to deal with it. You know what she is really like. She is like Bambi. She is like a little deer," Kathy said.