Sasha Obama was just 7 years old when her father, Barack Obama, was elected president and the family moved into the White House in January 2009. Nearly two decades later, the now-24-year-old is intentionally living far from the glare of the spotlight that once defined her childhood.
Still, even a private life has its moments. When Sasha joined her parents courtside at the NBA All-Star Game in Los Angeles—where both sisters now live—it was a rare public glimpse of the famously guarded siblings.
Privacy, however, has always been deliberate. As Michelle Obama once joked, lifelong Secret Service protection is “the Obama tax”—a tradeoff that comes with extraordinary circumstances. During their White House years, Michelle worked tirelessly to ensure her daughters experienced as normal a childhood as possible: driving themselves, attending prom, going to parties, even navigating the awkward missteps of adolescence—all while avoiding tabloid headlines.
“When we got into the car after dropping Sasha at college, that’s when we lost it,” Michelle later recalled, describing the emotional milestone. After graduating from Sidwell Friends School in 2019, Sasha enrolled at the University of Michigan before ultimately transferring to the University of Southern California, where she earned a sociology degree in 2023. Malia, meanwhile, took a gap year before attending Harvard University and later moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing and directing.
Throughout it all, Michelle has emphasized independence. “I’m not raising babies,” she said in 2022. “I’m raising real people to be out in the world.” That philosophy meant teaching practical skills—making beds, driving, accountability—so they would leave the White House bubble prepared for real life.
Now firmly in adulthood, Sasha and Malia are charting their own courses. As Michelle has shared, the goal isn’t for them to follow in their parents’ footsteps, but to “walk their own walk”—free to define success on their own terms, beyond the weight of history that once rested on their young shoulders.
