More than any presidential candidate before him, Barack Obama has fought his campaign on a family ticket. His wife, Michelle, has of course been crucial; but the role of the couple’s two girls, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, cannot be underestimated.

They have provided some of the best moments of the past 18 months, whether waving at their father from the stage, falling asleep during his speeches or asking, somewhat crossly, whether Daddy’s half-hour infomercial was going to interfere with their own cartoon-watching habits.

As they wake up to their first day as First Family, one thing has to be top of the agenda: how are those two little girls going to have any semblance of a normal life when their father is not just the American President, but also the first black American President? Not much pressure, then. Of all the children of famous faces, politicians’ children seem to have the roughest time. (Minor royals also take a pounding: constant personal attacks on Princess Beatrice recently prompted the Duchess of York to make a televised appeal for the press to back off.)

Criticism is levied at them from the tenderest of ages, beginning with their parents’ choice of nursery school and ending with public humiliation at the slightest slip-up. If they prosper, they are accused of nepotism; if they are less than successful, they are mercilessly pilloried. Curtis Roosevelt, the grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has recently published a memoir describing how his upbringing robbed him of self-confidence. At 78, he has yet to recover from the trauma.

For Malia and Sasha, the stakes are even higher for one simple reason: they are girls. There is nothing young girls are more sensitive about than their appearance, and there is nothing the media seems to enjoy doing more than criticising how politicians’ daughters look or behave. Just witness the drubbing Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol got. And wasn’t it her running mate who told a “joke” about Chelsea Clinton so offensive that the American media, for once, decided to censor itself?

Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing shock-jock, once described Chelsea as “the White House dog”. Nice. Needless to say, he is not a big fan of the Obamas; what he, and people like him, might be minded to say once Malia and Sasha get to that sensitive age does not bear thinking about. For the time being at least, both girls appear to be surprisingly level-headed. It is going to take all their parents’ formidable skills to keep them that way.

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