WASHINGTON — Malia and Sasha Obama have much to celebrate beginning next week: School’s out — and big birthdays are ahead. ADVERTISING WASHINGTON — Malia and Sasha Obama have much to celebrate beginning next week: School’s out — and big
WASHINGTON — Malia and Sasha Obama have much to celebrate beginning next week: School’s out — and big birthdays are ahead.
Days after completing seventh grade, Sasha Obama will turn 13 on June 10, meaning there will be two teens in the White House for the first time since the Bush twins.
Malia, now wrapping up her sophomore year of high school, marks her sweet 16th birthday on Independence Day. She’ll take driving lessons this summer and, an aspiring filmmaker, will ramp up her college search.
The two girls, among the most famous sisters on the planet, were 7 and 10 years old when their father captured the White House. Five and a half years later, the Chicago-born girls are denizens of the capital and emerging citizens of the world, but living their lives mostly in private as they come of age.
Both attend the $36,264-a-year Sidwell Friends School, a demanding prep school, and have high-energy after-school pursuits.
Malia, like her mother, loves tennis — and has a fierce backhand. Sasha performs with a dance group whose repertory includes ballet, modern dance, jazz, hip-hop and Afro-Asian fusion.
They’ve sprouted, lost some of their girlishness and made fashion choices suggesting that they, like their mom, have fallen in love with clothing. Malia has shed her braces; now Sasha wears a set.
Observers marvel at how rare have been their missteps in an age of 24/7 news and nonstop social media. In public, they rarely drop their guard, if you overlook the goofy selfies they snapped at last year’s inaugural parade.
Acquaintances say they remain unpretentious despite the scrutiny and security that surround their privileged lives. They credit the daughters themselves, plus their parents and live-in grandmother.
Malia is “extraordinarily sweet. She strikes me as being very genuine and a nice, caring person. She’s very mature, even interacting with adults, which she does on a regular basis,” said Marc Howard, a Georgetown University political science professor whose daughter, the same age as Sasha, used to attend Sidwell. The two girls have had play dates together.
Sasha, Howard said, is “spunky. She’s kind of a lively, entertaining person — a kid who likes to laugh. Like any kid, she has her sassy moments.”
He helped coach Sasha’s basketball team after the Obamas settled into the White House. “She was definitely a good player, she had good instincts for basketball, she was aggressive and she liked to shoot,” he said. “She scored a fair amount, which was always very exciting when the first family was at the games.”
It was, he pointed out, beginner girls basketball, “so there were five times as many turnovers as baskets. It was more about fun and playing together as a team.”
Howard said the girls’ maternal grandmother, Marian Robinson, has been a “constant presence” in their lives, noting: “She would be there at school events, sporting events and practices.”
Guests at Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday party in January, when Beyonce, Stevie Wonder and John Legend rocked the White House, said the two girls, their grandmother and godparents Kaye and Wellington Wilson were on hand with the president and first lady. The girls brought along several young friends, according to the guests, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
But life at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. isn’t all fun, games and A-list entertainers.
As the girls have grown up and traveled extensively with their parents, their horizons have expanded. In October, Malia met Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Pakistani student who was shot by the Taliban for talking about the right of girls to attend school.
After the girls attended the first five White House Easter Egg Rolls of the Obama administration, they skipped this year’s, as school was in session.
Peter Gosselin, a senior health care analyst with the Bloomberg Government information service, has a son at Sidwell a year ahead of Malia. In the upper grades, he said, the students have “hours and hours” of homework.
Gosselin, whose son will be a senior at Sidwell in the fall, described what awaits the Obama parents, both Ivy Leaguers: what he termed “college application hell” and a grueling battery of tests, including the SAT, Advanced Placement exams and finals.
“It’s just awful,” the father lamented.
The president told The New Yorker that Malia wants to be a filmmaker, and she is said to be choosing from among a number of top-level colleges.
Malia, her mother said recently, is a “great student, but she feels the stress thinking about college.” Sasha, who no longer studies Mandarin Chinese and has taken up Spanish, is “already thinking about college,” the first lady said.
The first lady said she’d like the girls to study abroad but isn’t forcing it.
Michelle Obama spoke during a spring break trip to China that she took with her mother and her girls in March. They met with China’s president and first lady, dropped in on schools, took in a panda preserve and toured the Great Wall.
“I’m just so proud of how they have managed all this with poise and grace and maturity,” the first lady recently told ABC’s Robin Roberts.
As for the older daughter learning to drive this summer, Michelle Obama joked on “LIVE with Kelly & Michael” that Secret Service agents don’t want her or her husband in a car with a teen behind the wheel. “I don’t think they want him in the state when she’s learning to drive,” she said. “We will fortunately be able to hand that responsibility to someone else.”
As the girls go through their teen years, dating may be an issue. Their father told comedian Steve Harvey in an interview last December that he wasn’t worried about his daughters dating for two reasons. For one, they’re “very sensible,” he said. Also, he joked, “I’ve got men with guns following them around all the time.”
t’s expected Malia will be a college freshman when her family’s lease on the White House runs out on Jan. 20, 2017, while Sasha will be in 10th grade. An open question is whether the Obama family — whose girls still consider Chicago home, according to their mother — will stay in Washington so the younger girl can finish high school at Sidwell.
