Former First Lady Michelle Obama pulled back the curtain on one of the quieter rules of raising her two daughters inside the White House: Malia and Sasha Obama were going to hear the word no, and they were going to hear it on purpose. She laid out the thinking on the September 9, 2026, episode of her podcast, “IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson.”
The subject surfaced with a listener question about how to handle a run of job rejections. Michelle Obama answered with a fitness metaphor. “Life is like a big muscle. You’ve got to build it up,” she said. “Every failure is like a push-up or a rep. The more reps you do, the stronger you get at life. You don’t get the strength without the reps.” She added that each person has to “learn what their own process is for getting through failure,” something people “figure out the older you get.”
Her brother and co-host, Craig Robinson, picked up the thread with a pitch to parents: let children fail while they are young. It is uncomfortable in the moment, he argued, but it pays off later, and it keeps the first genuinely crushing blow of a person’s 20s from landing like a total catastrophe.
Why She Told Her Daughters No
That was the opening for Obama to describe how she and former President Barack Obama handled it at home. “The girls tell me, ‘Mom, you used to tell us no.’ They’d be like, ‘Why?’ Because you need to know what no feels like,” she said. “Especially for kids like ours… there’s no natural ‘nos.'”
The bestselling author has said she did everything she could to keep both daughters grounded while the family lived in the White House, a stretch of their childhood in which almost nothing about daily life was ordinary. Her own upbringing supplied the contrast. “We grew up with a lot of ‘nos,'” she said. “It was, ‘No, we can’t afford that. No, you can’t have that.'”
How Malia Became Malia Ann
The remarks arrived a little over a year after Malia dropped “Obama” from her professional name. In June 2025, appearing on “Sibling Revelry,” the podcast hosted by Kate and Oliver Hudson, Michelle Obama disclosed that her elder daughter now works as Malia Ann. She said it matters enormously to her children to feel they have earned what comes their way, and that they bristle at the idea of anyone assuming they were simply handed things rather than working for them. Her daughters, she said, want to be their own people.
She also said she and her husband pointed out the obvious — that people would work out who the filmmaker was regardless — but that they respected their daughter’s wish to make her own way. The credit had already surfaced in 2024: when her short film “The Heart” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, the listing read Malia Ann. Barack Obama addressed the change in an October 2024 episode of “The Pivot Podcast,” saying he had told her audiences would recognize her anyway, and that she answered she wanted viewers watching for the first time to come to the work without that association. Both daughters, he said, go out of their way to avoid leveraging the family name.
In that same June 2025 conversation, Michelle Obama described her daughters’ teenage years as a period of pushing away, the stage at which a young person is trying to distinguish herself. Malia is now 28 and Sasha 25.
An Empty Nest and a Split Reaction
Family life had already been on the agenda earlier in the podcast’s run. On the August 26, 2026 episode, Obama and Robinson were joined by “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, and the talk turned to children leaving home. Obama said she has loved watching her daughters grow since they became independent, joking about Barack Obama’s tearful reaction to the college drop-off, and noting that Friday nights are no longer consumed by wondering where they were. She was emphatic that none of it signals distance, saying she has banked enormous amounts of time with her children and knows them thoroughly.
The candor divided listeners online, with some parents saying they could not relate and others praising her for an unusually honest account of the empty-nest years. Former “The View” co-host Meghan McCain weighed in on X on August 28, 2026. “I am obsessed with my children. Obsessed with them. I cried when my daughter started pre school 2 days a week,” she wrote. “Whenever the day comes they leave the nest – I am going to have a nervous breakdown and Ben knows this. I could not relate less to what Michelle Obama is saying.”
Filmmaking has become Malia’s path, while Sasha finished her degree at the University of Southern California in 2023. Michelle and Barack Obama, who have been married since 1992, were joined by both of their daughters when the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago opened. As their mother told it on “IMO,” the groundwork was laid long before any of that, in a one-word answer her daughters kept asking her to explain.