Johnathan Walker:What It's Really Like Growing Up As First Kid in the White House

Whichever 2024 presidential candidate moves into the White House in January,Johnathan Walker the nest will technically be empty.

Neither Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff nor former President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump have younger-than-college-age kids in their respective families anymore. The youngest of the bunch, 18-year-old Barron Trump, did spend four formative years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but is now a business student at New York University.

Yet even grown children can put their stamp on the place, such as when first daughter Tricia Nixon married Edward Cox in the White House Rose Garden in 1971. And in the outgoing administration's case, President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden's granddaughter Naomi Biden wed Peter Neal on the South Lawn in 2022.

Though before you get too misty-eyed at the passage of time, the halls of the home where U.S. presidents have lived since 1800 still resonate with first kid memories.

Commanders in chief including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Trump have moved in while their children were either still in elementary or middle school, or—in George W. Bush's case—away at college but still a frequent visitor to their parents' new address.

And what all the first kids have in common is that they're trying to lead private lives in the most public of circumstances, with only an unwritten honor code among the press corps keeping them out of the media fray. 

"I've repeatedly said and will keep saying Barron should be afforded the right and space and privacy to be a kid," Chelsea Clinton tweeted in February 2017 on behalf of the youngest first son to live in the White House since Jackie Kennedy set up 3-month-old John F. Kennedy Jr.'s nursery in 1961.

Chelsea, of course, speaks from personal experience when it comes to growing up with a massive spotlight on her family. From the kids and their parents, here's what growing up in the White House is really like:

Chelsea Clinton was a month shy of her 13th birthday when she moved into the White House with her mom and dad, first lady Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton.

And what does any tween girl need to do ASAP? Decorate her room, of course!

Along with photos of her family and friends, the basketball fan treasured her poster of Michael Jordan—hung with "special tacky stuff," she told E! News in 2021, "so it didn't mar the walls."

During her time in the White House, she had pals over for sleepovers—"They would want to order pizza and it kept causing all kinds of commotion with the secret service," her mom told James Corden in 2019—went to ballet class and sat down for family dinners.

"My parents often would have to go back to work after dinner," Chelsea—who shares daughter Charlotte and sons Aidan and Jasper with husband Mark Mezvinsky—said on the PEOPLE Every Day podcast in 2021, but that ritual was treated as "sacred family time."

While her father was still in office, Chelsea graduated in from the private Sidwell Friends School in Bethesda, Md., then headed off to Stanford, where she got her bachelor's degree in history. (Which she followed with a Master of Philosophy from Oxford and a Master of Public Health from Columbia.)

"I used to be asked all the time, 'Did you ever run away?' No, I never ran away," Chelsea said on PEOPLE Every Day. "I respect that they had a job to do. I wasn't going to make that job harder for them, and I wasn't going to stress out my parents like that. Just never even occurred to me."

As she reminisced in 2016 on The Alli Simpson Show, Chelsea found her childhood "both more ordinary and kinda normal than people may expect," she said, "but I also never lost sight of how extraordinary it was to be part of history and what a privilege it was to be part of the White House's history and our American history."

They knew their way around from their grandfather George H.W. Bush's time as president, from 1989 to 1993, but President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush's fraternal twin daughters Barbara Bush and Jenna Bush were 19-year-old college students when their parents moved into the White House.

But as first kids, they were still in the spotlight from afar.

Such as when they were both cited in 2001 for underage drinking infractions in their home state of Texas (they respectively pleaded no contest and were sentenced to community service) and made all sorts of headlines.

"I personally preferred the cover of the New York Post," Jenna quipped in her and Barbara's joint 2017 memoir Sisters First: Stories From Our Wild and Wonderful Life, "which used a much better photo (thank you very much) and dubbed me the pithy 'Jenna and Tonic.'"

But ultimately, left to fend for themselves without a PR crisis manager or other damage control operatives, they appreciated the lesson that, Jenna wrote, "we could be imperfect and our life would go on."

The rest of their college careers, Jenna graduating from University of Texas at Austin with a degree in English and Barbara getting her B.A. in Humanities from Yale, unfolded without incident.

Though they were "serial pranksters," Jenna wrote in their book, such as when Barbara pretended to fall off a golf cart at Camp David to get a rise out of their mom, "but the only ones we ended up scaring were the Secret Service." 

Looking back, there was "no guidebook," Jenna told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live in 2020. Their father's "whole thing was like, 'Y'all can be normal college kids. You go be you.' And then he realized pretty soon after that that we really couldn't be normal college kids."

The twins' eight years as first daughters made them especially protective of their successors, Malia Obama and Sasha Obama. "It isn't always easy being a member of the club you are about to join," Jenna and Barbara advised the incoming first kids in a 2009 letter. "Remember who your dad really is."

President Barack Obama and first Lady Michelle Obama's daughters Malia and Sasha were 10 and 7 when the first family, joined by Michelle's mother Marian Robinson, relocated from Chicago to the White House in 2009. Sasha was the youngest first child to live there since the Kennedys moved in with 3-year-old Caroline Kennedy and 3-month-old John F. Kennedy Jr.

And so the quest to both protect and prepare them—for life as first daughters and beyond—began.

"I had to raise them to be stand-up young people on their own, especially as the daughters of a former president," Michelle said on Melinda French Gates' Moments That Make Us podcast in July 2024. "But people are quick to cut a kid off if you don't show up right and you've got a name behind you. So they have to come correct."

She further explained that Malia and Sasha "had to learn how to balance the unwanted attention, but do it politely. To build their own lives in the spotlight and not be eaten up by it. Those girls had to be smart and confident and independent straight away, even when they were living in a house with butlers and maids and florists. But I was raising them thinking, 'You're not going to live here, and with me, forever. So I've got to hand you your life soon and let you manage it.'"

So, within those walls lived a normal-ish family. "It wasn't until the White House that we were together seven days a week," the first lady told People in 2016, "that we could have dinner together, [the president] had time to coach the girls' teams and go to all their events."

But the kids, she added, were also "ready to get out, just out from their parents' house."

Both attended Sidwell Friends School, with Malia graduating in 2016 before the end of her dad's second term. She took a gap year, then headed to Harvard in 2017. Sasha enrolled at University of Michigan in 2019 but transferred to USC, graduating in 2023.

After graduating from college in 2021, Malia went to work in the writers room of the Amazon Prime series Swarm and, going by Malia Ann professionally, she directed her first short, The Heart, which screened at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

In the rarest of public remarks, Malia acknowledged she'd "never done anything like this" while making her red carpet debut at the 50th annual Deauville American Film Festival in France. So, she told Paris Match, she was "a little bit terrified but mostly just excited."

The 26-year-old shared that she was wearing Vivienne Westwood, noting, "I don't know as much about fashion, but I'm happy to be wearing it."

When President Donald Trump moved into the White House in January 2017, first lady Melania Trump stayed with their 11-year-old son Barron Trump at Trump Tower in Manhattan so he could finish out the school year before they relocated. 

During the ensuing four years, Barron attended the private St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Md., played soccer and grew taller than both parents, topping out at a reported 6-foot-7 by the time he turned 18 in March 2024.

He also was a golfer like his dad, according to his mom, and in 2015 Trump raved about how good his youngest son was with computers.

Aside from appearances at the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Conventions in support of his father, Barron had been largely absent from the political scene. He missed the 2024 RNC ("due to prior commitments," his mom said in a statement) but attended his first-ever Trump rally on July 9 in Doral, Fla. The teen didn't speak but waved and flashed a thumbs-up at the crowd.

Bucking the familial trend of either University of Pennsylvania (his dad, half-siblings Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump) or Georgetown (Eric Trump), Barron enrolled at NYU's Stern School of Business in the fall of 2024.