Michelle Obama Says Daughter Malia Didn’t Follow Her (Funny) Advice Before Attending Harvard

Mom knows best! In a new interview, Michelle Obama confessed she gave her eldest daughter, Malia Obama, one piece of funny advice before she left for college at Harvard University — and Malia failed to follow her suggestion. So, what exactly was Michelle’s warning? “Don’t wind up on Page Six,” the 54-year-old joked before adding, “I don’t know if she managed that.”

Page Six is the New York Post‘s famous gossip section that reports on all-things celebrity, especially star sightings and happenings occurring in NYC. After Malia, 19, graduated from Washington DC’s Sidwell Friends School in 2016, the First Daughter took a gap year to work in the Big Apple before enrolling at Harvard — where her mom attended law school! — in fall 2017. During her time in NYC, Malia regularly popped up on Page Six while she was working as an intern for now-disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

Malia in NYC. (Photo Credit: Splash)

Malia’s Weinstein Company internship was interestingly not her first foray into working in showbiz. In 2015, she had a summer job on Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series Girls in NYC and, before that, served as a production assistant on Halle Berry’s CBS show Extant. In a recent interview, actress Halle publicly gushed about working with Barack Obama’s daughter on Extant.

“She was fantastic, she was amazing. I was such a huge fan of her. She is such a smart, beautiful, young woman. Look at who her mother and her father are, so duh!” Halle recalled. “She was down to do whatever a [production assistant] is asked to do, and I had wild respect for her for that. Everybody couldn’t really see her as a PA, although she tried and tried to be one. We just couldn’t really see her as one, but to her credit, she tried very hard to be one.”

Today, Malia is mostly staying out of the spotlight while living in a Cambridge, MA dorm and taking classes at Harvard. Though her parents are, of course, very proud of Malia for attending the prestigious university, her dad, Barack, recently confessed dropping her off at college was like having “open-heart surgery.”

He continued, “For those of us who have daughters, it happens fast. I dropped Malia off at college, and I was saying to Joe [Biden] and Jill [Biden] that it was a little bit like open-heart surgery. I was proud that I did not cry in front of her, but on the way back [home], the secret service was looking straight ahead pretending they weren’t hearing me as I sniffed and blew my nose. It was rough.”

The Obama family in 2016. (Photo Credit: Getty Images)