One of my favorite thinkers and writers, Emily Bazelon at Slate, suggests Ty's Sasha and Malia dolls is just the beginning of balancing what's good for the Obama family and what's good for the country:
...Barack and Michelle Obama's job as parents is to think first, middle, and last about what's good for their girls. When it comes to the kids, forget the country. Forget the opportunity and burden of being black role models, and all the children out there whose horizons will expand as they hug their little Sasha and Malia replicas. There are plenty of other people -- a whole nation's worth, it seems -- who can obsess about the implications of that. The Obamas have a harder task: negotiating the boundaries for their children without, apparently, resorting to the utter kids-off-limits policies of presidents before them. ...
The Obamas are still finding their footing over how much to let the girls into public view. Meanwhile, that parenting tightrope-walk is itself the subject of endless press interest. Mine included: I share the ambivalence of Salon's Broadsheet about how much I should be peering, via photograph or video, into those girls' wide-open faces.
My hope for Sasha and Malia is that at least some of the kids they go to school with will respond to them simply as kids. Sidwell is its own D.C. fishbowl, but at least the girls are young enough to have young, relatively uncanny classmates. Or at least a few. I heard a reassuring story, third-hand, along these lines: Soon after Sasha showed up for school, the mother of one of the boys in her class couldn't resist pumping her son for details. What was the president's daughter like? His answer went something like, "I don't know. She's a girl. I don't talk to girls." That's the best news I've heard yet about Barack Obama's girls since they moved to the White House. Let's hope that it's a bubble that lasts.
Related:
- Paparazzi could be a problem for first family (Time)
- Time photographer takes official, unofficial photos of Obamas (Politico)
- Girls' age, behavior should dictate coverage (Broadcasting & Cable)
- 'Let the Obama girls be girls' (Daily Beast)
- 'We need to get over the fashion analysis' (mndaily.com)
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