Family Life

01.16.09 | FL News Team

When Barack Obama is sworn in as President of the United States next week it will be the dawn of a new era in the White House.  But the Obamas will be very similar to recent first families in one aspect: they don't have a young son.

Obama's daughters, ten-year-old Malia and seven-year-old Sasha, follow President Bush's two daughters, Jenna and Barbara.  Before that, Chelsea Clinton called the White House home.

The first President Bush did have several sons including, of course, the current President, but the Bush kids were all adults. President Reagan's kids were grown up as well, the youngest being Ronnie Reagan who was 22 when his dad was inaugurated in 1981. The Obama girls will be the youngest White House residents since ten-year-old Amy Carter moved in, in 1977.

Prior to Amy Carter, the last White House children younger than college age during their Washington years were Caroline Kennedy and her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr, who lived in the White House from 1961 to 1963.

Before the Kennedys there were several Presidential daughters but you have travel all the way back to the Calvin Coolidge administration, in the 1920's, to find a young man in the White House. Coolidge had two teenage sons one of whom, Calvin Coolidge, Junior, died in 1924 when he was just 16 while his father was in his first term.