Growing pains in the White House! Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton opened up in a new interview on Monday, March 17, about calling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home during her teenage years.
"I was always deeply aware that I was living in history," Clinton, now 34, told Marlo Thomas in an interview shared by Huffington Post. President Bill Clinton's daughter would arrive home from school and walk through the receiving room, which she knew was a special place. "But then I would have dinner with my parents at the kitchen table every night!" she said with a laugh. "There was much about my life that also was normal."
Last week during her first visit to SXSW in Austin, Texas, Clinton provided anecdotes of growing up as somewhat of a normal teen in the '90s. "I definitely taught my parents how to text and how to charge their phones," she told a large crowd of 3,000 as reported by CNN. "I'm sure that's not uncommon for many people in this room."
The Stanford grad added that she would debate her parents on current events and hot button political issues growing up. "It taught me that not only was it okay to have an opinion and a point of view…it was expected."
Clinton was just 12 years old when her dad Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, took the West Wing in 1993. Enduring two consecutive Presidential terms during her rebellious teenage years in America's spotlight wasn't easy, Clinton admitted to Thomas. As the only child of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chelsea said her parents were strict. "My parents were very firm about me always getting my homework done," she recalled with a laugh. "But I'd get to attend special musical performances and shows sometimes."
Now a wife and working adult, who serves as the Vice Chair of her father's Clinton Foundation, Chelsea discussed the pressures of balancing her jam-packed schedule with sharing time with husband of nearly four years, Marc Mezvinsky. "My marriage is incredibly important to me," Clinton told Thomas. "It's the place from which I engage in the world every day, and the place to which I return every day."
On the horizon possibly for Clinton and Mezvinsky? As she told Glamour last November, the couple hopes to make 2014, "the year of the baby."
