If you had to pick up and move during your childhood, you know how difficult and even traumatic it can be for a kid to have to start over. Now imagine you’re not just the new kid, but the First Kid.
Susan Ford, daughter of Gerald Ford, was luckier than most, since her father had been a part of the government in D.C. for so long that it was just her normal life already. Plus, she was almost an adult when Richard Nixon resigned and her father became president. Ford told People, “I was a senior in high school, and the lucky thing is we lived in Washington, so I didn’t have to change schools like other president’s children.”
Not everyone had it so good. Susan’s father was defeated in 1976 by Jimmy Carter, who had his own young daughter. Rather than feeling any bitterness towards the child of the man who kicked her dad out of the White House, Ford just felt terrible for her: “My heart broke for Amy Carter, who had to move to Washington and make new friends and go to a new school. It’s hard on those kids.” In fact, the whole world saw how seemingly unhappy the 9-year-old Amy was, since the media was there to capture photos of her new life in America’s capital. Rosalynn Carter, quoted in “The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House” (via Erenow) recalled, “When she went to school the first day in Washington everybody was so distressed because Amy looked so lonely. That was just her normal life.”
