"Sasha is like a cat": Michelle Obama reveals why Barack found it "difficult" to raise their youngest daughter

Former First Lady of the US, Michelle Obama, opened up about the bond between her husband, Barack Obama, and their daughters. In the August 20 episode of the IMO podcast, retired NBA player Dwyane Wade and his wife, actress Gabrielle Union, joined Michelle Obama and her brother Craig Robinson to talk about family dynamics.

During the episode, Gabrielle Union shared how her bond with her parents was different from her siblings. Building on that, Michelle shared how her daughters, Malia and Sasha, behave differently with their father. She revealed that her oldest daughter, Malia, would go and talk to her dad to appease him.

On the other hand, she said, her younger daughter, Shasha, was not a pleaser. Michelle added that the former president found his younger daughter "difficult."

"Sasha is like a cat. She's like, 'Don't touch me. Don't pet me. I'm not pleasing you. You've come to me,' you know, and Barack's like, 'well, she's difficult.' I was like, no, the first one was a pleaser, right? And it was just temperamentally; they're still like that, right?" Mrs. Obama said.

Michelle Obama also shared a candid memory of her oldest daughter Malia's teenage years. She revealed how Malia balanced her social and family life. The former first lady recalled how her daughter would take time to talk to her father before going out.

"She would tell me, I'm going out this weekend, but I'm gonna go in and give Dad like 15 minutes. And she goes into the treaty room [to talk some politics]... And then she'd be like, okay, well, I am gone... " Barack would come out of the treaty room going, 'I just had an amazing conversation with Malia,'" Michelle Obama said.

Later in the episode, the Becoming author and Union discussed the importance of recognizing individual temperaments when raising children and mentioned that parents need to be a "chameleon."

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When Barack Obama and Michelle Obama discussed parenting

Barack Obama on the IMO podcast (Image via YouTube/ Michelle Obama)

Barack Obama appeared on the IMO podcast last month. On the July 16 episode of the podcast, Craig Robinson asked the former US president about his approach to raising his daughters. In his reply, Obama said that having the "right partner" is the key in parenting, noting that Michelle Obama’s role as mother to Malia and Sasha “made all the difference.”

"I do think, for whatever reason, we had similar strategies in the sense that I think we both believe that you give unconditional love to kids, but you also give them structure... We'd explain we believed in explaining why. But we also believed in being firm," Barack Obama said.

The former first lady shared that her husband would share the responsibilities when her daughter was a baby. Mrs. Obama said that her husband was an "engaged father" from the moment her daughters were born. She explained how the former president took care of baby Malia at night and helped her get to sleep.

"When Malia was a baby, we shared 50-50. He took a night shift; he's the night owl. And that helped me because I wasn't sleep deprived... I would go to bed at a reasonable bedtime and I could hand my baby...He was the one who got her sleep trained because I wouldn't have been able to handle letting my baby cry it out," Michelle Obama said.

In the same podcast, Barack Obama said that although he and Michelle did a "great job" in raising their daughters, he would have faced "more difficulty" in raising a son.

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Barack Obama and Michelle Obama got married in 1992 after three years of dating. The former first couple of the US welcomed their first daughter, Malia, in 1998, and Sasha in 2001.