Malia Obama has never been content to live in the shadow of her famous parents. If she had wanted to, nothing would have kept Malia from kicking back and never working a day in her life. However, since leaving the White House, she has attained an Ivy League education and begun an impressive film career that continues to impress.
Even as Malia’s career reaches new heights, it seems that her body is doing the same thing. We’ve essentially watched her grow up in front of us for all these years. Now, watching her tower over both her parents is a reminder that she’s all grown up. Keep reading to discover everything you need to know about Malia Obama’s shocking height transformation!
Becoming famous at a young age
Growing up, many of us wished that we were famous like the celebrities we idolized in movies and TV shows. However, one look at all those scandals involving child actors is enough to demonstrate what a double-edged sword fame can be. Malia Obama had to pick that sword up from a young age, and it wasn’t exactly her choice.
Malia was only 10 years old when her father won the presidential election and then moved everyone into the White House. That meant she went from being relatively unknown to being a household name in a very short span of time. That fame brought many privileges (including the mass wealth her family accrued after leaving the White House), but it also came at a very high price for the young girl.
RELATED: The Truth About Sasha And Malia Obama’s Last Night In The White House
The pressures of being a public figure
Life in the public eye was difficult for Malia Obama for multiple reasons. One, of course, was that she was under constant media scrutiny, and she knew that anything she said or did would be dissected by countless media outlets. The other source of pressure, however, was actually her own mother!
In an episode of her podcast Michelle Obama: The Light, Michelle described the pressure that both Malia and Sasha were under. “It was no accident that our children had to show up right in the world.” According to her, the girl had the added pressure of representing Black people on nothing less than a global stage. “They carried the burden of making sure they weren’t messy because it wouldn’t have been laughed off; it wouldn’t have been just ‘Oh, it’s youthful’ or whatever. It would’ve been some statement about the soul of Black folks.”
Trying to have a (mostly) normal childhood
When the cameras weren’t rolling, Malia Obama had a mostly normal childhood. We say “mostly” normal because she had to deal with things most other kids never had to deal with, including having bodyguards constantly follow her. She even had her own White House code name: “Radiance.”
Still, Barack and Michelle wanted Malia to have as much of a normal childhood as possible. That meant making sure Malia knew important housekeeping skills. As Michelle later told Today, “I [had to] beg the housekeepers, ‘These girls need to learn how to clean their own rooms and make their beds and do their laundry. You cannot do this every day because they will not live here forever, and I am not raising kids who don’t know how to make a bed.”
RELATED: Malia Obama’s Surprising Relationship With Joe Biden
Keeping her nose relatively clean
These lessons from Michelle Obama were ones that Malia took to heart, which is one of the reasons she had led such a scandal-free life. However, that doesn’t mean she hasn’t occasionally generated some scandalous headlines.
For example, at the 2016 Lollapalooza event, Malia was recorded apparently smoking a joint. Even though marijuana is legal in Illinois where the event was held, this event generated countless headlines about how Malia had become a party girl. It was an unfair label then and now, but it never managed to really hold back her life or career goals.
An impressive height
Malia Obama was relatively short when she first entered the White House. However, the more she was photographed next to her famous father, the clearer it was that she was destined to be the tallest one in her family!
When Malia was only 13 years old in 2011, she was already nearly as tall as Barack Obama. These days, she’s actually taller than her basketball-playing dad, and it’s downright impressive to see how tall this celeb has grown in front of our very eyes.
RELATED: The Shocking Nasty Habit Sasha And Malia Obama Learned From Barack
An equally impressive resume
It’s impressive that Malia Obama has grown so tall, but that’s not really anything she had much control over. Fortunately, her awesome Hollywood resume has been growing almost as fast as her body.
After graduating from Harvard, Malia Obama began to focus on her career in earnest. She has served as an intern on the hit HBO show Girls and she later became a writer on Donald Glover’s show Swarm. As for Glover, he has nothing but praise for Malia: he told Vanity Fair that “She’s just, like, an amazingly talented person” who is “really focused, and she’s working really hard.”