Presidential Children who were Separated from their Parents

Maintaining a work-life balance is difficult for anyone with a job. Add kids to the mix, and it gets even harder. It can be easy for any mom or dad to be so caught up in their careers that they lose closeness to their children, but this dynamic can define that relationship for years. And this problem is apparently common among presidents.

Being the leader of the free world, after living a high-performing public life that sets you on the path to the presidency, is fraught with pressure. Basically, something has to give way, and in many cases, unfortunately, it is the Commander-in-Chief’s relationship with his children. Regardless of their performance in the Oval Office, these presidents, at one point, were not the most worshipful parents. They were “old school” parents … which meant they were several levels of retention, distant and non-intervention when it came to raising their presidential children. Here are the presidents who did not feel the strongest connections with their children.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, his four children from two marriages were already adults, and almost all had experienced a certain tumult with their father. According to The Baltimore Sun Reagan had distanced himself from his first group of children, Maureen and Michael, after divorcing Jane Wyman and marrying Nancy Davis. Maureen reportedly once read a biography of her father, claiming that she only had two children, whom she had with Nancy, Patti Davis, and Ron Reagan, Jr., while Michael alleged that the President chose to attend the wedding of the Richard Nixon’s daughter, Tricia, who was celebrated the same day as their nuptials.

While Co-Chair of the Republican National Committee Maureen reached out to her father during her presidency, Patti Davis continued to have a particularly strained relationship with her parents. By People , Patti’s brothers stopped talking after their 1986 novel, Home Front , about a retention father who becomes president, was published. He later wrote a revealing memoir called The Way I See It , in which he alleged that his mother was an abusive user of pills while his father looked away. Furthermore, politically progressive Patti was ideologically at odds with his conservative father; Due to that tension, they didn’t see much of each other during his presidency. In 1994, he was charging $ 39 to participate in his seminar, “Recovering from Dysfunctional Families.”

The Reagan family reportedly approached amid the former president’s battle with Alzheimer’s.

Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the culmination of a political career that included the vice presidency, serving as the powerful leader of the majority in the Senate, and an election to the House of Representatives in 1937. His constant companion and second in command: his wife, Claudia, better known as Lady Bird Johnson. She financed her first campaign in Congress and ran her office during the 1940s.

When daughters Lynda and Luci were born in 1944 and 1947, respectively, that did not change the Johnson’s working life much, as the couple reportedly trusted that their household staff would take care of most of the chores. parenting. According to Joshua Kendall’s First Dads. Parenting figures included cook Zephyr Wright, former employee Willie Day Taylor, and personal assistants living on site, Helen and Gene Williams. In the summer of 1955, the then senator. Johnson suffered a heart attack and convalesced at the family ranch in Texas, which was where he eventually spent a significant amount of time with his daughters.

According to People Johnson reportedly fathered a secret love son whom he never recognized, Steven, with his alleged lover, Madeleine Brown. Steven didn’t learn his supposed fatherhood until adulthood: “I realize I had to think about his position and about the girls and his legal wife … [but] if he had recognized me … I probably would have walked away from fears and anxieties I had as a child «.

Warren G. Harding served as president for just two years, took office in 1921, and left after the death of a heart attack in 1923. Elected on a post-World War I anti-immigrant and pro-business platform, Harding surrounded himself from corrupt advisers: Their reputation suffered posthumously, when some of them were implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Home Secretary Albert Fall personally benefited from renting public land to oil companies, according to the Independent .

Even more scandalous was Harding’s secret private life. The president had no children, at least not with his wife, Florence King, but after his death, it turned out that he had fathered a daughter named Elizabeth with Nan Britton, his lover, who was 31 years his junior, according to The New York Times . In 1928, Britton revealed everything in his book, The President’s Daughter , including how she had given birth to Harding’s baby in 1919. Britton, who died in 1991, was never able to conclusively prove during his life that Harding was the biological father. Elizabeth, something DNA testing confirmed in 2015, ten years after Elizabeth’s death. . Raised by his aunt and uncle, it is unclear if Harding ever met his only son, who was about four years old when he passed away.

Relative to other presidents, whose lives have been scrutinized by magazine writers while in office and historians for decades and centuries afterward, Martin Van Buren’s private life has not been arduously documented. There are many interesting curiosities about the eighth president (he served from 1837 to 1841), such as how he was fluent in Dutch and co-founded the Democratic Party.

As for personal details, Biography reports that Van Buren married cousin Hannah Hoes in 1807, only for her to die at the young age of 35 in 1819. (Fun fact: Van Buren, who never remarried, nor He never even mentioned it in his memoirs) By Britannica , Hannah’s death left Van Buren as the single father of their four young children, all under the age of 12: Abraham, John, Martin Jr. and Smith. According to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the future president passed on the care of his motherless children to his relatives because he was so busy with his burgeoning political career. However, he reportedly “frequently expressed regret that he was no longer involved in his education,” but “did provide his education and well-being.”

As his children grew, Van Buren attempted to establish closer relationships with them: During his presidency, they all served as “his trusted assistants and advisers.”

Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald Trump with his first wife, Ivana, receives much praise from her presidential father in the press. However, the family patriarch rarely speaks, or even is seen, with his other daughter, Tiffany Trump. Born in 1993 to Marla Maples, Donald’s second wife, Tiffany grew up primarily in California and was raised by her single mother, as her parents divorced in 1999. In short, Donald Trump remarried in 2005 (with the model Melania Knauss) and was welcomed by a son, Barron, a year later. Along with his business interests and the presentation of the reality show, The Apprentice , The balance between work life and the future president in the Big Apple meant that he had little time left to see Tiffany.

While Tiffany Trump made a few appearances towards the end of her famous pop’s famous 2016 presidential campaign, that doesn’t mean they were both close or closer since then. “Since the opening, Tiffany and her father have sometimes gone months without speaking and she spent a long time without seeing him,” said a source. People in 2018. “The last time you were at a family function with him, it was uncomfortable for her and you didn’t feel totally welcome.”