Chelsea Clinton on Empowering the Next Generation and the "She Persisted" Children's Book Series
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#263 - Chelsea Clinton, former first daughter, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation shares steps we can take to empower the next generation. On the podcast she gives us a glimpse of family life with three young children and reveals a never before shared mother-daughter moment from her own childhood when she truly "persisted”. We also celebrate her new book SHE PERSISTED IN SPORTS: American Olympians Who Changed the Game, the third book in Chelsea Clinton and Alexandra Boiger’s #1 New York Times bestselling She Persisted picture book series.
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Transcript
Ellie Knaus: You're listening to Atomic Moms, a modern parenting podcast about the joys and complexities of caring for our children and ourselves. I'm Ellie Knaus. And since 2014, we've been celebrating and commiserating with world class experts, bestselling authors and parents around the world.
Hello everyone. Well, we're still in 2020. Yeah. So was scary. Oh, Halloween is coming. What are you guys going to do for Halloween? Are you going to do trick or treating socially distanced? Are your kids going to wear really creative masks? Like face masks, not just costume masks? What's the plan? I want to know: Instagram me at @atomicmoms. There is a lot of talk about a hair dye over at our house.
2020. It's really hard right now for a lot of people. And one thing that's been making me feel a little better is when I remember the women in my family, as well as women throughout history who have persevered despite unbelievable obstacles.
It's how I remind myself that we can do really, really, really, really, really hard things. We are wired to overcome these challenges. And that is what we are talking about today with Chelsea Clinton. In this intimate conversation, we celebrate her new book She Persisted in Sports: American Olympians Who Changed the Game.
It's the third book in Chelsea and Alexandra Boiger's #1 New York Times bestselling She Persisted picture book series. This one highlights American female athletes who have faced their own unique sets of challenges and excelled because of their persistence. We're going to talk about the inspirational women who deeply influenced Chelsea's life and talk about what life is like at home with three young children these days, and the ways in which she introduced activism to her kids from the very beginning. And she reveals -- I love this story-- a never before shared moment from her own childhood when she truly persisted. And I especially appreciate hearing how her mother navigated it.
Chelsea Clinton has a long list of New York times bestsellers under her belt. She's also the Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation working on many initiatives, including those that help empower the next generation of leaders. She lives in New York city with her husband, Mark, and three children. You're listening to Atomic Moms and we'll be right back.
[Music]
Chelsea, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'd like to start this off by sending out some love to all those caregivers out there that are juggling so much on a Monday. Can you set the scene for us? What is your current work from home setup is like today so that we can all commiserate together.
Oh, goodness. Well, I think there are a few things that are kind of bunched together there. I mean, I certainly think we all owe an extraordinary incalculable amount of gratitude to our caregivers as you kind of started with, and certainly they deserve kind of that respect to kind of have, have more, kind of manifestations in reality than I think we've seen from our government, certainly at the federal level and from many citizens. I mean, I think we should still be staying home whenever we can be, working from home, kind of living at home, playing at home, reading at home, listening to podcasts at home, you know, and wearing masks whenever we're outside. And so it is, you know, it's been, I think, challenging for me, to hear some people kind of in one moment, you know, applaud our caregivers are frontline workers.
And then in the next moment, kind of excoriate. Fauci or masks or kind of the importance of having real safety and efficacy testing at scale for any potential COVID vaccine. So that's my response to the first part of your kind of opening and then kind of the second, I think, you know, the honest answer is every day is different depending on like what's happening with my kids and what's happening with their lives and kind of when they need to be online or not online and kind of trying to navigate my husband's work and my work and my kids work and not over-stressing our internet, because we found when everyone's on the device at the same time, like our wifi does not like that very much. And that you know, most days, most things happen, but like we, you know, there was a day last week where I was cleaning up after lunch and I was like, Oh no, I didn't do the dishes from breakfast yet. Oh, well, that's just, that's just, I can't, I can't worry about that today.
So, you know, every day is different, but we're incredibly grateful to be healthy. Um, we also recognize there's a lot of privilege in being healthy and being able to kind of work from home and support our kids, uh, when they need to be learning kind of from home and I'm not worrying about being able to afford kind of the masks we need to protect ourselves.
So, you know, I think the answer is every day is different. But every day is full of so much gratitude and also recognition about how privileged and lucky we really are.
Yes, my daughter is in first grade, and she's doing in person learning two mornings a week. And the school nurse called right before this interview. So of course my heart just went
Chelsea Clinton: [00:06:33] Oh my gosh.
Ellie Knaus: [00:06:34] -- up my throat.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:06:34] That is much more important than talking to me.
Ellie Knaus: [00:06:36] And I was like, AHH! And luckily it was just that I had a conversation with the principal. I like pointing out...potential issues. I like to channel my inner-Fauci. And so, it was just the nurse calling me back so we could discuss some things. And so now I'm just still trying to calm myself down because, yes every day it's different, and you don't know what that call's going to be. We're just constantly pivoting. And yeah, the dishes have to wait. This morning I was like, "You know what? Dishes after Chelsea."
So we, we are here to celebrate your latest picture book, She Persisted in Sports: American Olympians who Changed the Game. So Chelsea, this is your third book. We have your other two. We love them. It feels kind of crazy to call it a picture book cause it's really, it's like an art book with so much inspiration!
Chelsea Clinton: [00:07:31] Well, I will pass that along to Alexandra, the just extraordinary illustrator. I mean, I am so thankful that she, you know, when I, when I first reached out to her in 2017 about She Persisted was interested in the project, thankfully at the time. Because I just think she's so extraordinarily talented and I couldn't imagine these books without her, her partnerships. So yes, I think it is really fair to call them, call them art books and I will pass that along to her.
Ellie Knaus: [00:08:05] You feature 13 American Olympians, and I want to know which one is your daughter Charlotte's favorite?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:08:13] Oh my gosh. Simone Biles. That is an easy answer. I mean, she has the Simone Biles' leotard. She's not terribly coordinated, but she tumbles around and she's says, "I'm just like Simone!" And I'm like, "Yeah. You know, just like it, like with a lot of energy."
Ellie Knaus: [00:08:34] I forgot in reading this that Kerri Walsh Jennings was pregnant when she won the gold medal.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:08:39] Yes!
Ellie Knaus: [00:08:40] And that reminder really put some wind in my sails.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:08:44] It was really important to me to include mothers. And Serena Williams, you know, is infamously famous for having won the Australian open when she was pregnant. And I just think it is really important that we celebrate women in kind of all that we are.
And just, you know, the amount of certainly persistence for women athletes to, I think, to be women athletes and kind of given all of the challenges that women still face, you know, especially kind of around equal pay, but kind of certainly not only around equal pay, and then to do it while becoming a mom was something I wanted to celebrate.
Ellie Knaus: [00:09:34] Well, I, you know, I wanted to thank you personally -- and your parents -- for bringing Ruth Bader Ginsburg into all of our lives. We are pre-recording this listeners, and, uh, we learned of her passing last Friday. It just feels like another hard moment in 2020. It can often feel like we are in the middle of a dark tunnel.
So Chelsea, I'm going to ask you to do a little heavy lifting here. In what ways do these Olympians that you feature in this book, in what ways do they carry the flame of hope for all of us?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:10:13] You know, I think, I think about my grandmother a lot, Ellie, in that she, she was born before women had the right to vote and then she lived long enough to vote for her daughter, for President, which I just think was sort of amazing, kind of what she saw in her own life. And she was born to a teenage mom who didn't have the have resources, certainly not the financial resources, but also not the kind of maternal resources of love and patience and commitment and resilience to be able to raise her. And so she kind of lived with her grandmother for a while, and then her grandmother, unfortunately, um, kind of kicked her out before her 14th birthday. And she then had to work to support herself and put herself through school. And yet she created this home full of such like love and possibility and, and support and kind of family. Even though she hadn't had that in her own kind of lived experience. And she spoke about the women who inspired her, and some kind of were very much, kind of her teachers or high school guidance counselor, and some were the women that she just kind of knew through, through television or kind of through, through magazines, newspaper.
And she would talk to me when I was little girl about how much. Kind of Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Wilma Rudolph had really inspired her, that kind of these two women. Babe Zaharias who excelled in so many different sports at a time when kind of, so few women were playing sports and even fewer were playing kind of competitive sports.
And, and then she really remembered kind of some of her earliest memories like watching the Olympics on television, watching Wilma Rudolph, this extraordinary Black woman, American athlete just like literally run past everyone else. Um, yeah, she was just like, you know, a middle-class housewife in Chicago, but she drew real inspiration in her own life from these just extraordinary women athletes. And so I answer your question that way because I didn't grow up knowing anything but drawing inspiration from women who were proving what was possible, like on a track or in a pool or on a field, on a court, on a mat.
And then feeling like, okay, I may not be able to do that specifically because there are very few people in the world who could do that, but I can like, think about what I can do and just push a little bit harder and persist a little bit more.
Ellie Knaus: [00:13:07] When I think about your grandmother, I just got such a kick learning that you and your mom and your grandmother had a book club together. And I just think that's so cool. A lot of this podcast is about reparenting ourselves and going back generations. And I share this with you, that going back many generations, I found out that my great-grandmother was not raised by her mother and there was a lot of turmoil and there, and there wasn't a lot of connection. And it's so beautiful that, thank you for sharing the ways that your grandmother healed that and created the kind of family life where three generations would have a book club together.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:13:51] Oh gosh. I loved our book club. I mean, we, um, thankfully had similar sort of interests, curiosity tastes, I guess, in books. So we never had to wrangle over what we were going to read. So we just got to really like, enjoy the active of reading together and then talking about the books that we were reading. I miss my grandmother every day and my children very much know about like their great-grandmother. And they call her grandma Dorothy to distinguish between like, you know, my grandma, Dorothy, and then their grandma, which is what they call my mom. And then they called my mother-in-law Nana. But it is, it's like just such a, a blessing for me when they're like, "Oh, would Grandma Dorothy like that?" And I'm like, "I think she would." It's really brings me a lot of gratitude.
Ellie Knaus: [00:14:44] Well, you just mentioned your mom, and you've shared in the past that you would go to your mom's office on the weekends. I share that with you. My mom is a lawyer, and I remember going to her office all the time. And she really instilled in me a sense of persistence. And I'm curious if you could share with our listeners just a particular moment in growing up where your mom really modeled that persistence for you.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:15:12] Oh, gosh, well, admittedly, um, I don't know if I've ever talked about this before. I must've at some point, but my mom, she was that the first woman partner at the Rose Law Firm, which is the oldest law firm West of the Mississippi, unfortunately founded by Uriah Rose, who was a white segregationist, horrific human being, in the late 19th century. But I didn't know any of that. I was a little kid. I just knew that my mom was the first woman partner there. And, um, she would talk to me about her different cases. And I was always so interested in kind of what my mom was working on. And I was always so proud of her. And then one day, one weekend, I was at her office and there was a stuffed duck on the shelf. And I said, "What is that? And she said, "Well, I went hunting with some of my partners like a couple of weekends ago, Iike I think last month, and you know, and I shot the duck, and one of the men took it home and they eat the meat, and then they stuffed it up, and they gave it to me." I looked at her and I said something like, you know, "What if that duck was someone's mother?" And I burst into tears and I got very upset and my mother then was like very upset. And I didn't speak to her for three days.
Ellie Knaus: [00:16:48] You are so persistent!
Chelsea Clinton: [00:16:50] When you're a little kid, it's like a really long time to ice out your mother. And my dad kept saying like, "You gotta talk to your mom. She feels terrible." And I was like, "Talk to her? It's just like the movie Bambi." And my dad was like, "It's not like the movie Bambi." And I was like, "It is like the movie Bambi."
And yet to your point about persistence, my mom, like, you know, every morning before school would still come and like get me up and like, help me get ready, eat breakfast, you know? Every, repeat, like in the evening, she just kept talking to me. She kept telling me how much she loved me. She kept asking me about my day, even though I wouldn't reply. And then finally on the fourth day I was like, okay, I have to talk to my mom again. My mom promised she would never go hunting ever again. But she certainly was very persistent in showing her love and her patience and her kindness and her understanding, um, but certainly not giving up, like on, on me. She didn't like leave me alone to stew. She very much like just was very persistent and in her love and care for me, even though I was very angry at her, you know, my, I don't know six or seven year-old-self.
Ellie Knaus: [00:18:03] I love that she just kept checking in. That's such a great piece of parenting advice, you know, to let your kid feel their feelings, but just, you know, keep checking in. Does Charlotte share this character trait of persistence? I'm asking for my own...my first grader, Sabrina is so headstrong and, uh, (laughing) I'm just wondering how you win a fight?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:18:27] Yeah. I mean, she is super headstrong. You know, I think, um, this thankfully isn't, you know, I think now seven months in, we're in a different place now, but you know, in March when everything, I don't know, like where like most of your listeners are, but like in the middle of March, we, um, you know, we kind of put ourselves into quarantine and like our preschool moved online.
And I mean, we did have lots of tussles over, you know, bedtime because they're sort of like, "Well, mom, I just like, I can go on my pajamas to school," and I'm like, "No, we're still going to get up, like brush our teeth, get dressed. Like we're still going to school. And they're like, "But we're not going to school. " I was like, "No, we are going to school. Like, we're still going to school. I know it's on a screen, but like, we're still going to school. We're still going to like, get up, like get dressed, brush our teeth, which means like we're still going to bed on time." And, and that, I mean, there were lots of conversations around like, "Well, but now, like we don't have to walk the 20 minutes to school, so I should be able to stay up 20 minutes later," and I'm like looking at my then three and newly five year old and I'm like, "No, no, we are, we are living our same routine just with some serious modifications." But I think, you know, we, Mark and I, prevailed in the end.
Ellie Knaus: [00:20:01] I love that they have their like little lawyers already.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:20:04] Oh my Gosh yes.
Ellie Knaus: [00:20:05] It comes innately.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:20:06] "The 20 minutes Mom, like we're not walking the 20 minutes, so I should get to stay up 20 minutes later." I'm like, "No, that's not how this works." I'm a secretly, I'm thinking like that is a really good point.
Ellie Knaus: [00:20:15] I know! I'm always so proud of her for these for, yeah, her argument is always really strong. Okay. When Charlotte was two years old, you took her to her first protest rally. And I'm wondering, can you share with us, like, what was the meaning behind that experience for you as a mother?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:20:33] Oh, well she, I mean, she, and now Aidan, have been to a number of protest rallies, and you know, I think, some of the ones that we went to, like when she was two, I don't think she understood. It was important for me to show her there are lots of ways to be a citizen, like, you know, we've always taken our kids with us to vote even when they were babies.
And yeah, I think you're a citizen, you know, everyday, not just election day. And there are lots of ways that we show how we want to be good citizens in the world. Like right now we hopefully wear masks. Um, and you know, sometimes we have to stand up against what we think is wrong. And so, No Ban, No Wall protest we certainly took her to. I think we took her to a few No Ban, No Wall protests. I think though, the one protest that she really understood was the March for Our Lives protest that we went to in New York. And granted it was, that was probably her, I dunno, they're third, fourth, fifth protests.
I mean, certainly not her first couple. And I think she just viscerally, even as a little kid, understood, oh yes, kids should be safe in school. Also her preschool soon thereafter started having active shooter drills. And so I think she also kind of, you know, soon thereafter we kind of connect: yeah, this is not right.
She couldn't have articulated that, but I think she really understood like, yeah. I'm three or four, five, like I shouldn't be cowering in my preschool classroom, practicing what we do if there's an active shooter. Of course that's wrong. And of course there shouldn't be guns that enable kind of people to do something that is so fundamentally awful.
So she couldn't have said all of that to you, but I think she really got that and one of the climate marches and she really, and now she's like, "Oh yeah. Now I've been to a lot of these marches." And I think Aidan really kind of understood that too. You know, yes, we should have clean water and clean air. And Charlotte's obsessed with sharks. And she's very worried about the rate of decline as she should be in shark populations, and she doesn't understand why people think sharks are just bad. She will never see the movie Jaws. It will be like soul crushing for her. So she's also able to connect I think these big things that we talk about, or these big ideas and kind of big prerogatives that she sees, we go to marches or protests, she's like, "Oh yes, this does connect to things in my life. Things that I care about, things that I think are kind of important."
I think that's the beginning of how we helped to teach kids like what's right and what's wrong.
Ellie Knaus: [00:23:40] I really appreciate what an advocate you are for children globally. And I read on the Clinton Foundation initiative site "Too Small to Fail" and I'll quote the site. It says, "Today almost 60% of children in the US start kindergarten, unprepared lagging behind their peers in critical language and reading skills."
So Chelsea, I'm wondering, can you give us a COVID update on this initiative? Because I know children were really struggling to read at grade level before the pandemic. What are your concerns with distance learning and with falling even further behind now, and how can we as parents help?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:24:22] So I think I'm certainly concerned about distance learning and I'm really concerned both for obviously families who don't have the tools or the connectivity to kind of plug into distance learning. And also, you know, especially for the millions of kids who have disabilities and kind of receive kind of specialized education and services kind of through, through public schools and, firmly believe that we should prioritize around the country. Of course, if it's like, if community transmission rates are low enough and if it's safe enough to get any kids back in school, that we kind of prioritize getting back into school. Kids with disabilities and kids who are not able to learn remotely because they may not have a computer at home or their families may not have wifi at home and feel pretty strongly about that.
What we've done through Too Small to Fail is both still try to support parents in the places they may be with kids. So we have a number of playgrounds around the country that are now, many of them are in places that are now open, where there are kind of prompts on the side of the playgrounds to talk to kids like while they're playing, because we know, you know, 80% of our brains are built by the time we're three. And so much of that is through communication. It's parents, grandparents, caregivers are a child's first teacher. And yet we know so many people don't know how important it is to talk to kids. So just kind of wherever they may already be, if kids even during COVID, again, hopefully with the masks on it and a social distance way, like reminding them to still keep talking to their kids.
You even behind the mask. We know sometimes people now are uncomfortable or they may not kind of be talking in much behind a mask, but still super important that kind of kids hear language. Um, we've distributed tens of thousands of our indoor activity, um, toolkit through diaper banks and food banks.
So again, parents would be coming for diapers or food and essential things they need in this moment, kind of giving them, you know, books and activity suggestions. And again, just anything to help. It seemed kind of easy for, for parents and caregivers to talk and engage, um, with their kids. And we have the tool kits in both English and Spanish. We've distributed, I mean, over the course of Too Small to Fail, we have distributed more than a million books, but we've distributed tens of thousands of books, especially in Little Rock where we ran alongside World Central Kitchen, a food distribution program at the Clinton Presidential Center.
So. You know, just been trying to continue to support parents and caregivers and helping them be their child's first teacher wherever and however we can, like during COVID.
Ellie Knaus: [00:27:34] Well, I have one last question for you before you get back to all this important work. I just wanted to ask, because you obviously grew up in the spotlight - and now with kids today and social media, it almost feels like everybody's growing up in the spotlight - So I'm wondering, how did your parents foster your inner confidence? How did they teach you to have a thick skin for public criticism? While still nurturing your ability to trust yourself, your friends and your spouse someday?
Chelsea Clinton: [00:28:07] I think it was both through kind of what they did and also what they didn't allow really, or at least when they tried to stop.
I mean, they did work very hard to protect me from the kind of media and the public gaze. And that was true in Arkansas when my dad was governor, and then certainly, in the White House. Also, like they never got me a pager. Like a lot of my friends had pagers in high school. Like I was not allowed to have a pager.
Ellie Knaus: [00:28:42] Me neither.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:28:43] I was not allowed to have a pager when that was a thing. If I needed to reach my parents, like I had, if I was at a friend's house, I guess I could use their phone. Otherwise I had to go like to the payphone outside of my high school, you know, drop in change and call them through the White House operator.
Quite similarly in college, like my freshman year, a lot of my friends had cell phones. I think, I think I got a cell phone my senior year. It may have been in the summer before my senior year. I think I got a cell phone like the summer before my senior year and my parents got me the phone, but I had to pay for the plan.
And I remember I think I was the last of my friends who had a cell phone. I mean, I still had like an answering, like that's how my friends found me. It's like, they call, I did have my own phone number in the White House, but my friends would call and like have to leave a message on my answering machine. And then I would like call them back. I'm like so antiquated to anyone, like under the age of thirties, listening to this. And I think that, but I think that all really mattered. I also, now, as a parent, I'm really grateful because I think it gives me a lot of moral standing to say to my own kids, for these things to be like, "Yeah, I didn't grow up with that." It's going to be my version of like, "I walked five miles uphill with no shoes on." So I'm really, really thankful. And I think, you know, I just, I always knew that I was loved and I give my parents, and my grandparents, unfortunately like my first year in Washington, my, mom's father and my dad's mother, both passed away.
So I think I was always very close to my grandmother, Grandma Dorothy, for many reasons, but became especially close to her because she was my, you know, living grandparent and then she moved to Washington. And so I just think, you know, it was just the deep seated knowledge that I was loved.
And then that I knew that they protect me as best as they could and that they also, I kind of didn't connect me in even ways that kids could have been connected and were connected. You know, in the, in the mid and late nineties.
Ellie Knaus: [00:31:12] Thank you so much. I'm going to be thinking about your Dorothy all day. Thank you for sharing all of this with us.
Chelsea Clinton: [00:31:20] Thank you. And I'm glad everything was okay when the school nurse called you back.
Ellie Knaus: [00:31:23] Oh yeah, I'm sure I'll have bullet points for her. Everybody, you can find all three of the She Persisted picture books online or at your favorite independent bookshop. You can follow Chelsea on Twitter at @ChelseaClinton or on facebook facebook.com/chelseaclinton. Don't forget to subscribe to @atomicmoms on your favorite podcast app. Please leave a written review. It helps new parents find us. You can say hi on Instagram at @atomicmoms. And if you haven't already, check out my conversation with the Omega Institute co-founder Elizabeth Lesser. That episode's called, Where the Feminist and Spiritual Paths Meet. Until next time, trust in your goodness, live out your greatness, persist on Atomic Moms.
About Our Guest: Chelsea Clinton
Chelsea Clinton is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World; She Persisted Around the World: 13 Women Who Changed History; Don’t Let Them Disappear: 12 Endangered Species Across the Globe; It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!; Start Now!: You Can Make a Difference; with Hillary Clinton, Grandma’s Gardens and The Book of Gutsy Women; and, with Devi Sridhar, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? She is also the Vice Chair of the Clinton Foundation, where she works on many initiatives, including those that help empower the next generation of leaders. She lives in New York City with her husband, Marc, their children and their dog, Soren. You can follow Chelsea Clinton on Twitter @ChelseaClinton or on Facebook at facebook.com/chelseaclinton.
Podcast Pairing:
UNTAMED with Glennon Doyle
#251 • Glennon Doyle shares how to love in the time of coronavirus. This mother of three and #1 New York Times bestselling author of LOVE WARRIOR, CARRY ON, WARRIOR, and UNTAMED (March 2020) speaks with host Ellie Knaus about mother issues, anxieties, honoring our boundaries, and feeling all the feelings while housebound.
Moments after hopping off the phone with Glennon, we discovered my immunocompromised husband Adam has a 102 fever and is now in self-quarantine in our bedroom. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was exactly the conversation I needed to have in order to step bravely into this unknown. Luckily the kids are being hilarious though this mess. Follow along @atomicmoms.
Xx Ellie Knaus
Show Notes: Here.