Michelle Obama Gets Candid About Raising Kids in the White House

Michelle Obama is opening up about her family’s time in the White House.

The former First Lady of the United States reflects on husband Barack Obama‘s presidency in a candid new interview on Conan O’Brien‘s podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. On the latest episode, the Becoming author shares how “in awe” she is of her daughters, Malia Obama, 20, and Sasha Obama, 17.

“We had to parent by creating this cocoon of normalcy in a pretty crazy, abnormal world,” Obama tells O’Brien. “We spent eight years just going, ‘It’s OK! You’ll be fine, this is normal, just go to school. You have men with guns…hey, you know, you’re safe, don’t complain! You have food, so don’t complain to me.'”

“It was very much, keeping them in their reality,” she continues. “Making sure we went to the parent teacher conferences, and that we went to the games and that we were sitting on the sidelines with them.”

Obama adds that it was important that Sasha and Malia had sleepovers with their friends, just like the rest of their peers.

“We had kids sleeping over at our house,” Obama tells O’Brien, adding that her kids thought “no one wants to come” to the White House.

“I was like, ‘You are wrong, my friend,'” she recalls. “But their view was, ‘I don’t want to be here, I’m here all the time. I want to go to X’s house.'”

Obama says she found this as a “healthy” sign.

“I am in awe of my children for the way they have managed this whole thing with poise and grace,” she shares. “There’s a resilience that they’ve had to develop.”

“They’ve also had to sacrifice a lot of their childhoods, living in this glare and being the subject of some of this nastiness themselves and learning, at a very young age, how do you recover from that,” Obama explains. “They were the ones going out into the world every day, trying to be regular little girls.”

You can listen to the complete interview with Obama and O’Brien above!