Barack Obama isn’t surprised that his daughter changed her name.
Malia, the former president’s 26-year-old daughter, dropped her last name for her directorial debut, The Heart, which played at the Sundance Film Festival in February. She was instead credited as Malia Ann, her middle name.
Obama shared on The Pivot Podcast Tuesday that both his daughters, Malia and 23-year-old Sasha, don’t want to use their parents’ influence to help with their careers.
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“The challenge for us is letting us give them any help at all,” Obama said. “I mean they’re very sensitive about this stuff. They’re very stubborn about it.”
Despite Malia wanting to distance herself from her famous last name, Obama reminded ahead of her film premiere that people will recognize her anyway.
“I was all like, ‘You do know they’ll know who you are,’” Obama said. “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.”
Obama also explained how he tried to combat press attention during his daughters’ childhoods in the White House. Both girls were in elementary school when Obama won the presidency in 2008, and he cited the disruption to his daughters’ lives as the reason why he almost didn’t run for office.
“I basically made a deal with the press pool,” he said. “I said, ‘You can follow me around. You can talk about me. You do whatever you need to do. Leave my children alone because they have the right to grow up. They didn’t choose this. Let them grow up.’ And to the credit of the press, they did leave them alone.”
Now that the girls are adults, they’ve undergone more scrutiny from the media, but they aren’t letting that get to them.
“As they’ve gotten older, there’s been some paparazzi stuff going on, and it drives them nuts,” the former president said. “Their attitude is, ‘We’re not looking for all that.’ So they’re grounded.”
