Spending Formative Years In White House

As President-Elect Obama prepares to take office, his new office, Michelle Obama will surely be getting their two daughters, 10 year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha, ready for their move to the White House, and experts say it will be an amazing education.

"You get to meet everybody, celebrities of sports and entertainment, business and art and science," points out historian and author Doug Wead, who wrote "All the President's Children."

He says that, while most of those who have grown up in the White House enjoyed it, there's a definite downside.

"You're in a fishbowl," he explained. "If you make a mistake, the whole world knows it, and everything is second-guessed and questioned by the public."

Wead says that that's why Jackie Kennedy was adamant about shielding her children from public scrutiny.

Her philosophy, he says, "was to keep them out of the limelight. She didn't allow any pictures of them to be taken of them. The pictures that we have that are so famous, that we think are every day in the life of the White House -- she was out of the country when they were taken!"

Wead adds that Jackie personally advised the Clintons to keep their daughter, Chelsea, away from reporters during their time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the media cooperated.

"In the Clinton era," Wead noted, "we knew about his private sex life, but journalists were respectful of his daughter."

But other presidents have been less protective. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon allowed cameras at their daughters' weddings, and Gerald Ford let his daughter, Susan, host her prom at the White House.

Susan Ford, whose name is Susan Ford Bales today, says life in the White House can be tough for a kid. "It's the articles that are written," she says, "the critical letters that you get in the mail from people who don't even know you, who just read something in a magazine or a tabloid or whatever. And you really don't ask to be there."

Malia and Sasha, for better or worse, will always be remembered for their years as first children.

"A snapshot is taken of the child during the presidency, and the public keeps it forever," Wead says. "There's something that Sasha and Malia will say, or something that their mother or father will do with them in the next four years or eight years. And they will be remembered for that for the rest of their lives."

A big decision the Obamas will have to make is where to send the girls to school. The Carters tried public school for Amy Carter, Bell says, but that turned out badly, so Bell guesses the Obamas will opt for private school for their daughters.