Couldn't find what you looking for?

TRY OUR SEARCH!

Table of Contents

Hillary Clinton has painted a picture of her parents as hard-working middle-class people who went through many struggles in their lives. The real story, as always, is much more interesting.

Hillary Clinton's only child, Chelsea, was just 12 when her father was elected president of the United States and she moved to the White House with her parents. That seems like a far cry from a normal childhood and an immense amount of pressure, doesn't it? Life in the public eye with your parents' actions continuously scrutinized can't have been easy, and as Chelsea's mother and First Lady, it would have been Hillary Clinton to help Chelsea adjust to that strange life. The negative media attention didn't escape Chelsea, however.

Chelsea said of her mother:

"I think for better or worse, I don't remember a time when she wasn't being attacked by people who didn't want to see her succeed — whether she was fighting for early childhood education in Arkansas, or universal healthcare in the 1990s — so I think I'm quite accustomed to her being under attack."

(And we're not even mentioning her dad, who certainly grew accustomed to the same treatment!)

However, the Clintons did their best to shelter Chelsea from negative media attention and the public eye in general, and tried to provide her with as normal a childhood as possible. Her parents were "very firm about me always getting my homework done", she mentioned, adding that "I'd get to attend special musical performances and shows sometimes."

Chelsea always knew, she shared with the press, that she was living in a special place and occupied an extraordinary position, in that she was watching history being made right under her nose as a teenager. She also, mind you, talks about teaching her parents how to send text messages and having family dinners every night. In conclusion: "There was much about my life that also was normal."

In a campaign video, Hillary Clinton shared:

"When Chelsea was just a really little baby, and she was crying and crying all night, I couldn't figure out what to do and I was getting really upset and frustrated. So I was holding her, and I was rocking her, and I said to her, 'Chelsea, you've never been a baby before and I've never been a mother before. We are just going to have to work this out.'"

Working things out is something she and Chelsea have apparently never stopped doing. Today, her daughter is one of her staunchest supporters, saying that she's hoping to be able to offer her daughter Charlotte

"the same gift of imagination and kind of sense of possibility that my mom gave me."

It's hard to imagine a greater compliment to give your mother, isn't it?

It might be the twenty-first century, but we as a society are still, it appears, scared of high-flying women. Hillary Clinton has worked hard, throughout her campaign, to also portray that "other" side of herself — Hillary Clinton the mother, grandmother, and daughter next door — perhaps in an effort to remove some of that fear and make herself more relatable to voters. While the fact that women running for president clearly feel the need to talk about how they couldn't get their babies to sleep at night, something that really isn't expected of men, is questionable, Clinton has also uniquely shown that she understands the lives that the rest of us lead.