In an election in which the mom in chief is a key campaigner, there is one thing Michelle Obama has promised she will not discuss: her daughters’ dating lives.
Just about everything else in the parenting realm, it seems, is fair game.
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No, Malia, who is 14, is not dating — yet. But the conversation, which was sparked during one of the first lady’s many parenting tell-all chats, was a reminder of just how much the Obamas’ daughters have grown up in the past four years.
The first daughters, who have largely been absent from the campaign trail this time around, are evoked often by their proud parents. In the couple’s first joint television interview of the campaign season, the president said that Malia “is turning into a night owl like me.”
In fact, Michelle Obama — who goes to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. — has said that her husband and daughters often tuck her in now.
Other evidence that Sasha and Malia aren’t the little girls they once were?
“They’re now at the point where they still love their daddy, but they come in [to visit him] strategically,” the president said on an episode of ABC’s “The View” that aired Tuesday. “They’re not being surly or anything,” but they’ll give him five minutes and then go.
It’s quite a shift. Many remember Malia as a 10-year-old onstage at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, sweetly saying, “I love you, Daddy!” to an image of her father on a large screen. She is now a freshman in high school who plays on the varsity tennis team.
Little sister Sasha is now 11, and her dad helped coach her basketball team, the Vipers, last year.
The sight of the first family onstage together this month at the Democratic convention in Charlotte created buzz as 35 million television viewers took note of Sasha and Malia’s growth. Their photos are rarely seen outside of celebrity-watching People magazine, which wrote in its “Celebrity Babies” column after the convention that the “stylish tweens . . . looked amazing” in their H&M and Anthropologie dresses.
On “The View,” the president recounted what his daughters were doing in the moments before he took the stage to give his speech: “People are whispering in their various headphones, and I’m about to go on cue,” Obama said. “Suddenly, I see Sasha and Malia spinning around.”
He asked what they were up to, and his daughters replied, “This is just like in the Hannah Montana movie,” in the moments before the singing Disney star takes the stage. Then the girls started cracking themselves up, the president said.
Malia and Sasha are often about town, but when they are not with their parents, the Washington press corps does not cover them, giving them a modicum of privacy. It has been left to their parents to describe their lives, and the first lady paints her daughters’ schedules as mundane: Their grandmother greets them when they get home from school, they cannot watch television on school nights, and they eat dinner with their parents at 6:30 p.m. They are not on Facebook. Their favorite television show is “Modern Family.”
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