Former First Lady Michelle Obama recently talked about the backlash she got for wanting to prioritize raising her kids during former President Barack Obama’s time in office.
During a recent episode of the podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, Obama talked about her new book, The Light We Carry, and the pressure on the younger generation.
“I write about how this generation, you know, with this constant negative news and the worry about everything, they’re always on their phones. They’re getting too much information. The young people I run into are worried. They are worried about the world,” she said.
“All of them. They’re worried about climate change. They’re worrying about crime in their neighborhoods and they’re young thinking about ways to fix everything. You know, and they wear themselves out,” Obama added.
“Well, it’s paralyzing,” O’Brien said.
“It’s paralyzing. Totally paralyzing. When the thing they need to do is focus,” Obama replied.
She insisted that we should focus on the smaller tasks in life in order to make a difference.
“All you can do at 1215 is go to school. Go to class, finish your homework. You know, start there because that’s the stitch — Those are the stitches you put together. And if you don’t put each of those stitches together, you will never be of
“Because you will flame out. You will never graduate. You won’t learn how to write. You won’t — So you’re trying to take on these big problems that are too big for the power that you have, but you do have power to control the thing you can,” Obama added.
She compared the lesson to her transition into the White House when she was first asked about her agenda as First Lady. At the time, Sasha Obama and Malia Obama were just seven and ten years old.
“That’s why I say — when I got into the White House, when people asked me what was gonna be my agenda, I said, ‘Well, my first focus is gonna be Mom-in-Chief, you know, because I have to make sure that the kids I’m in charge of are good before I can help anybody else’s kids,” Obama said.
“And I got criticized by feminists about that, like ‘Mom-in-Chief?’ And I was like, well of course I’m gonna do everything else. That was a given. I know how to work, I know how to be a professional. I knew, you know, but I thought it was an important thing to say ‘I have to control what I can,'” she added.
“I brought these two kids in the world. I
She insisted that “small is where change happens.”
“We so make great the enemy of the good. We so, you know, wanna fix climate change that we don’t even vote. You know, we want a democracy, but we can’t be bothered to do the one thing we actually control, which is go to the pole one day every now and then and push a couple of buttons. But we want everything to be fixed because we think big is better. And what I find is that small is where change happens,” she concluded.
Listen above Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.