Parenting Through the Presidency

Curt Roosevelt is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandson, and has come out with a new book, Too Close to the Sun, discussing his famous childhood and the way it screwed him up, the London Times writes. After his parents’ divorce, Franklin and Eleanor became Curt’s de facto parents. While FDR was a warm grandpa who read Curt the funnies in bed, Eleanor took him to welfare projects for destitute children. Curt said that he and his sister “had a marvelous life, but it was a life in which no one ever said that I had to do anything. This is devastating for a child.” His cosseted existence made him end up with “an unrealistic view of what I was; I became addicted to the dream world, to a neurotic degree.” Curt thinks there’s hope for Obama’s daughters if he wins the presidency – he called Barack and Michelle “much more sensible parents than mine were.”