Inside Sasha Obama’s Private Post-White House World

“Every weekend was hard following these little girls around,” Michelle told Oprah in February 2020. “We had to worry about what parties they were going to, whether there was alcohol, I had to know who the parents were, so every weekend for me was hard.”

That was toward the end of their time there, though. When they first got to the White House, the first lady wondered how she was going to make their new palatial residence, complete with tuxedo-wearing butlers, many of them Black and Latino men, feel like home.

“We had to change the dress code,” Michelle told Stephen Colbert during the final stop on her 34-city Becoming book tour, explaining how she didn’t want Malia and Sasha—or their friends—to get the impression that having liveried black servants was something normal to see in life. “You can’t walk around every day in a tuxedo. Girls would have pool parties and play dates and little kids over, and it’s like, that doesn’t even look right to me. And I had to beg the housekeepers, ‘these girls have to learn how to clean their own rooms and make their beds, and do their laundry. You cannot do this every day, ’cause they will not live here forever—and I am not raising kids that don’t know how to make a bed.'”

When the family acquired Bo and Sunny, their Portuguese water dogs, helping to care for the first pets was added to the girls’ list of responsibilities.