Michelle Obama Reveals What Malia & Sasha Do That Gets On Her Nerves The Most
Rejoice, because Michelle Obama’s podcast has arrived! The first episode of The Michelle Obama Podcast hit Spotify on Wednesday and, already, it’s proving to be even more impactful and relatable than we expected. For instance, in the inaugural episode, Michelle spills the tea about the thing daughters Malia and Sasha Obama do that most gets on her nerves. And as she teases at the end of the episode, the rest of the season will get to the root of relationships and the kinds of conversations we all need to have around our dinner tables “to appreciate the importance that community plays on who you are.”
As Michelle explains in her first episode, which features husband Barack as her guest, the idea of the podcast sprouted up after the family left the White House. Once she “finally had time to breathe,” she threw herself into reflecting on their time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — and she didn’t stop there. “I went even deeper,” she said. “I looked back on the whole arc of my life.” Which brings us to this first episode, in which she and Barack explore how parenting (and perspective) has shifted since their youth.
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“The phrase that sticks with me from my parents is ‘never enough.’ ‘Cause the minute you had a little bit of something — a pint of ice cream, chocolate and you ask for strawberry — you’d get in trouble. It’s like, ‘How dare you not be satisfied with what you have?’… And I find myself saying that to Malia and Sasha. That’s the biggest thing that gets on my nerves — they know it. We’re doing something great, and you start looking at each other. It’s like, ‘never satisfied’. Stuff doesn’t make you happy.”
A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama) on Jul 29, 2020 at 5:00am PDT
And while Michelle jokes about feeling guilty for not being satisfied with her “little bowl of ice cream,” she and Barack agree that the culture, when they were younger, was decidedly different. “I think when we were coming up, the culture wasn’t beating you over the head every day with what you should have,” Barack suggested, which Michelle readily agreed with. She added, “We didn’t feel poor, but you go back to visit the house we grew up in and you think, My God, we were broke.”
It wasn’t as noticeable, tendered Barack, because life then was less about material possessions. “I think that culturally we’ve become much more focused on stuff and much less focused on relationships, family. And part of being an adult, part of being a citizen is you give something up.”
But as Michelle points out, today’s society centers consumerism and accumulation. “The model has become not that you sacrifice, but that you should be able to have it all — and how you get it, and if you’re not getting it something’s wrong,” she lamented. “I always joke that’s the opposite of how we were brought up. You were never supposed to have it all, you know? In fact, if you had it all, you were being greedy ‘cause if you had it all, that meant that somebody else didn’t have anything.”
A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama) on May 8, 2020 at 7:00am PDT
Yet, here we are, with generations of children who are stuck in a cycle of never feeling satisfied. “That’s what we’re kind of teaching young people — you should have a career; you should earn a lot of money; you should be fulfilled; you should have your passion; you shouldn’t have to sacrifice that much. You should have it all,” said Michelle, noting that such a philosophy essentially sets kids up for a lifetime of disappointment and skewed sense of entitlement. And, worse, it fosters alienation.
“We’re all on our own,” she added of this kind of culture. “It’s dog-eat-dog. It’s not us; it’s us against them.” This is precisely why Michelle’s pet peeve with her daughters is the “never enough” mentality. To counter it, she and Barack are committed to having the hard, honest conversations on a continual basis with their kids, leading her to joke, “Sometimes our dinners get a little heavy.”
Before you go, click here to see photos of celebrity kids all grown up.
Launch Gallery: 26 Photos of Sasha & Malia Obama Growing Up Before Our Eyes
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