elegant bare-shouldered top. She looked beautiful and about twenty-three years
old.
By my reckoning, we did manage to play it cool, though Malia still laughs,
remembering it all as a bit excruciating. Barack and I shook the young man’s
hand, snapped a few pictures, and gave our daughter a hug before sending them
on their way. We took what was perhaps unfair comfort in the knowledge that
Malia’s security detail would basically ride the boy’s bumper all the way to the
restaurant where they were going for dinner before the dance and would remain
on quiet duty throughout the night.
From a parent’s point of view, it wasn’t a bad way to raise teenagers—
knowing that a set of watchful adults was trailing them at all times, tasked with
extricating them from any sort of emergency. From a teenager’s standpoint,
though, this was understandably a complete and total drag. As with many aspects
of life in the White House, we were left to sort out what it meant for our family
—where and how to draw the lines, how to balance the requirements of the
presidency against the needs of two kids learning how to mature on their own.
Once they got to high school, we gave the girls curfews—first 11:00 and
eventually midnight—and enforced them, according to Malia and Sasha, with
more vigor than many of their friends’ parents did. If I was concerned about their
safety or whereabouts, I could always check in with the agents, but I tried not to.
It was important to me that the kids trusted their security team. Instead, I did
what I think a lot of parents do and relied on a network of other parents for
information, all of us pooling what we knew about where the flock of them was
going and whether there’d be an adult in charge. Of course, our girls carried
extra responsibility by virtue of who their father was, knowing that their
screwups could make headlines. Barack and I both recognized how unfair this
was. Both of us had pushed boundaries and done dumb things as teenagers, and
we’d been fortunate to do it all without the eyes of a nation on us.
Malia had been eight when Barack sat on the edge of her bed in Chicago
and asked if she thought it was okay for him to run for president. I think now of
how little she’d known at the time, how little any of us could have known. It
meant one thing to be a child in the White House. It meant something different
to try to emerge from it as an adult. How could Malia have guessed that she’d
have men with guns following her to prom someday? Or that people would take
photos of her sneaking a cigarette and sell them to gossipy websites?
Our kids were coming of age during what felt like a unique time. Apple had