The Devastating Truth About Barack Obama's Childhood

Barack Obama had a childhood that was unique and all too common. On one hand, he was the son of a single mother who sometimes had to resort to food stamps to provide for her family, even though she was highly educated. Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. divorced in 1964, when Obama was 2. But his father was already gone by then, having left them the previous year. Obama Sr.’s leaving left a young Obama to grapple with his identity as a mixed-race boy during the civil rights movement.

On the other, the truth about Obama’s reality was complex. Obama’s parents were determined academics who wanted to see positive changes, albeit through different approaches. Dunham didn’t resent Obama Sr., but the young Obama still suffered the consequences. “I know the toll that being a single parent took on my mother … And I know the toll it took on me,” he said in a 2008 Father’s Day speech (via Politico). During a rough patch, Dunham left her 10-year-old son with her parents and flew halfway across the world.

Obama’s mother’s work also took him to Southeast Asia, where he was exposed to a reality so foreign — and often so cruel — that it left him no choice but to change how he viewed the world from then on out. ‘”The world is complicated, Bar,’ she used to say. ‘That’s why it’s interesting,'” he recalled in an Instagram post. Obama’s formative years were filled with struggles — but also powerful lessons.

Barack Obama Sr. was an ambitious man. When he received his B.A. in economics from the University of Hawaii in 1962, he envisioned big things in his future. He moved to the U.S. to pursue an education so he could return to his home country. Kenya’s independence movement had been brewing since the Mau Mau uprising against the British rulers in the ’50s. Obama Sr. wanted to be a part of change. His father, after all, had been kidnapped and tortured by the British during the events. 

His goals didn’t change after he met Stanley Ann Dunham or after she gave birth to their son, Barack Obama, in 1961. When he graduated a year later, he didn’t hesitate to take his next step. Even though he received scholarship offers from other universities that would have given him enough money to support his family, Obama Sr. chose the less substantial offer from Harvard. “Barack was such a stubborn bastard, he had to go to Harvard. ‘How can I refuse the best education?’ he told me,” Dunham said, as the younger Obama recalled in “Dreams from My Father.”

In 1963, when his son was 2, Obama Sr. left. According to a friend, it wasn’t an easy decision. He loved his family, but he believed he was doing the right thing. “He expected great things of himself and he was going off to achieve them,” Neil Abercrombie told the Chicago Tribune in 2007.

Barack Obama was too young to remember his father when he was with his mother. He would only see Barack Obama Sr. once after. He came to the U.S. to visit his son in the early ’70s, when Obama Jr. was 10. “That trip was the first and last I saw of him; after that, I heard from him only through the occasional letter,” the younger Obama wrote in a March 2021 Facebook post. Obama Sr. gave him a basketball and taught him about jazz music, and that was that.

While it is true that Obama Sr. left Stanley Ann Dunham to raise their son on her own, the reality was also more nuanced. Dunham was also an aspiring anthropologist who had also left her husband. In 1961, Dunham moved to Seattle to study at the University of Washington, bringing her newborn son along. She knew that the man she had agreed to marry wanted to be a part of Kenya’s democratic transition. In fact, Dunham had agreed to move to Africa with him.

But between the Obama family’s vehement opposition to the marriage and the bloody conflicts raging on, Dunham changed her mind. “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I divorced him,” she said in “Dreams from My Father.” She hoped her son, now that he was an adult, could understand the complexity of their situation. “I hope you don’t feel resentful towards him,” she said.

When Barack Obama was 10, he moved in with his grandparents while Stanley Ann Dunham stayed behind in Indonesia. For four years before that, Obama had lived there with his mother and Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, and half-sister, Maya. But Dunham worried that life in Jakarta was hindering Obama’s chances of getting the opportunities she had. While he attended a local school, his mother woke him up before dawn to supplement his English-language studies.

It was a grueling ordeal. “At a certain point, she decided she wasn’t serving his interests well by keeping him in Indonesia and in Indonesia schools,” biographer Janny Scott, author of “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” told NPR in 2011. In 1971, she sent Obama back to Hawaii to live with her parents. She reminded him of the great times he had with his grandparents.

But it was a different argument that convinced him. “‘You won’t have to wake up at four in the morning,’ she said, a point that I found most compelling,” he wrote in “Dreams from My Father.” Dunham and Maya joined him in Hawaii a year later. When his mother returned to Indonesia to do anthropology fieldwork three years later, it was Obama who wanted to stay. “I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight,” he wrote.

Barack Obama’s early childhood in Hawaii wasn’t always easy, as Stanley Ann Dunham often struggled as a single mother. But it was still a life of abundance compared to what he witnessed after moving to Indonesia in 1967, when he was 6. Obama found himself in a place he couldn’t have imagined. In letters to his grandparents, he shared his experiences in this new land. But he lacked proper understanding to relay much of what he saw.

“I didn’t tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food,” he wrote in “Dreams from My Father” (via The Guardian). He also didn’t write about his classmate’s baby brother, whose death was blamed on spirits brought in by the wind, or about the desolate look on farmers’ faces when faced with droughts one year and floods the next. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel,” he wrote.

However, his experience taught him valuable lessons about privilege and basic rights. In Indonesia, he learned that friends come from all walks of life, and he is grateful Dunham gave him that exposure. “She had a core belief in our common humanity, and she made sure I recognized the inherent dignity in every person,” he penned in an Instagram post in her honor.

As he lived away from his mother and under the loose vigilance of his grandparents, Barack Obama attempted to discover himself and his identity as a Black man raised by white folks. His self-discovery quest became an obsession. He wrote letter after letter to his father in hopes he had the answer. He didn’t, so Obama stopped writing. “I had grown tired of trying to untangle a mess that wasn’t of my making,” he wrote in “Dreams from My Father.”

Obama then wanted to stop the search, to stop caring. But it was hard. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it,” he wrote, admitting to using marijuana and cocaine to help numb his feelings. A friend tried to convince him to keep experimenting with stronger drugs, including heroin. He stopped at cocaine. “Not smack, though — Mickey, my potential initiator, had been just a little too eager for me to go through with that,” he added.

While Obama’s honesty about his dabbling in drugs in his youth sets him apart from other presidents, he isn’t proud of it and wishes he hadn’t done it. He considers it one of his biggest moral failures and blames his experimentation on his self-centeredness at the time. “I was so obsessed with me and the reasons I might be dissatisfied, I couldn’t focus on other people,” then-Senator Obama said at a 2008 forum hosted by Reverend Rick Warren (via CNN).