Michelle Obama just opened up about her biggest fears before her husband Barack Obama took office in 2009. On the latest episode of her podcast “IMO,” which she cohosts with her brother Craig Robinson, the former first lady revealed that she was most concerned about her daughters Malia and Sasha.

“The biggest worry that I had when Barack was elected, it wasn’t the difficulty of the job. It wasn’t the strain or the hardship or the threats or all the things you might imagine,” Michelle shared.

Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson at SXSW on March 13, 2025.

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“I worried about my girls. I worried about moving them out of what was the only community and home they had ever known, where my brother was down the street and my mom was picking them up from school,” she continued, adding that the family had “a really wonderful life in Chicago,” their hometown.

Given Malia and Sasha’s ages at the time—they were ten and seven, respectively—Michelle said she had a lot of guilt about uprooting their 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥hoods.

“I thought, ‘I’m gonna do the worst thing to these kids,’ I’m going to pluck them out in the middle of the school year, mind you,” she explained, referencing the fact that presidential terms begin in January.

Barack, Sasha, Malia and Michelle Obama on election night in 2008.

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Michelle added that even amid the stress of Barack building his cabinet and hiring staff, she was more focused on how her daughters’s lives would change.

“So while we’re transitioning, I’m thinking, ‘I gotta get these kids in a school where where they’re not gonna just be any kids, they’re gonna be kids with secret service,'” she said.

Despite her fears, Sasha and Malia “did way better” than Michelle expected.

“I mean, they transitioned better than I was transitioning,” she concluded.

Sasha, Barack and Malia Obama on November 25, 2015.

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