Michelle Obama says keeping daughters’ teenage smoking and drinking out of tabloids was a ‘nightmare’

Michelle Obama has spoken about what it was like to keep her two daughters out of the news as they were entering their teenage years.

On Tuesday, the former First Lady appeared on SiriusXM’s Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa, where she discussed the “nightmare” that came from trying to keep the teenaged antics of daughters Malia Obama, 26, and Sasha Obama, 23, out of the public eye. Malia and Sasha were 10 and 7, respectively, when their father won the presidency in 2008. But when he won a second term, they had to live most of their teen years in front of the whole world.

“They had to drive and they had to go to prom and they were on teams and they traveled to other schools and they had to do college searches, and they went to parties and they had drinks, and they tried out smoking and they did all the things,” Michelle said.

“Every weekend was a nightmare, because we had to work to make sure that them being regular teenagers didn't wind up on Page Six.”

While trying to keep Malia and Sasha out of tabloids, Michelle also said her daughters’ childhood years required “a lot of intentionality.”

“When your kids are under the security of the Secret Service, you almost have to work twice as hard to make their life normal,” she said. “Imagine setting up the first play date or the first time the kids get invited to a play date. The process of having my children at your house meant that an advanced team had to come and question and search your house and ask if you had drugs and guns.”

With both Malia and Sasha now being in their 20s, Michelle said her current focus for them is to handle what she called “the Obama tax,” or the pressure of being a child of a former president.

“You'll have it the rest of your life, but you also have a lot of benefits,” Michelle told Ripa. “I'm trying to make this feel normal to them, because you don't want them to start thinking, number one, they’re full of themselves, that any of this is about them, and that their job is to go about their lives.”

Malia previously tried to detach herself from the Obama name when she made her directorial debut in February at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival with The Heart. Instead of the film’s credits listing her as Malia Obama, she used her first and middle name, Malia Ann.

In October 2024, her father, Barack Obama, spoke on The Pivot Podcast where he admitted the choice didn’t come as a shock to him. “The challenge for us is letting us give them any help at all,” he said about both Malia and Sasha at the time. “I mean they’re very sensitive about this stuff. They’re very stubborn about it.”

Despite Malia wanting to separate herself from the family name professionally, her father reminded her that people may still recognize her regardless.

“I was all like, ‘You do know they’ll know who you are,’” Obama said on the podcast. “And she’s all like, ‘You know what? I want them to watch it that first time and not in any way have that association.’ So I think our daughters go out of their way to not try to leverage that.”