What kind of life awaits next presidential kids?

McCain, by contrast, is reticent about discussing his seven children from two marriages, especially his son Jimmy, a Marine corporal who returned from Iraq earlier this year. The public sees little of the McCain kids except for Meghan, 23, who blogs from the campaign trail on McCain Blogette.

The senator's older three children — two sons of his first wife, Douglas and Andrew, whom he adopted, and a daughter they had together, Sidney — are in their 40s. With Cindy McCain, he has Meghan, Jack, Jimmy, and their youngest, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh as an infant. She told a young reporter for Scholastic News in December that her favorite subject at her private school in Phoenix is history, and that she loves playing sports.

"We are a normal family just like everyone else," she said.

Like the 71-year-old McCain, many presidents haven't been young enough to have small children in the White House, and so a young family like the Kennedys or Obamas is rare. "A young family creates a whole different atmosphere," says Betty Monkman, who was a White House curator for 30 years until 2001 and wrote "The Living White House."

Monkman remembers Amy Carter having friends over to carve pumpkins on Halloween, playing in her special tree house designed by Dad, or collecting money around the White House for the March of Dimes. She also recalls a historical scavenger hunt that her staff designed for Chelsea and her friends from Little Rock on the night of the Clintons' inaugural ball.

"These were normal, active kids," she says of both Amy and Chelsea. "They were able to come and go and have a life." Chelsea, she notes, was active in ballet and with her church youth group, and the media generally left her alone.

Identity crisis in White House children?
Of course, there was the time Mike Myers referred to Chelsea in a sketch on "Saturday Night Live" as not "a babe," prompting an angry reaction, then an apology by the comedian. And there was a bit of a flap when Amy sat reading at the state dinner. "She didn't attend any formal dinners after that," Monkman notes.

Jenna and Barbara Bush, 19 when their father became president, have been known to chafe at their Secret Service protection. However burdensome, all that security didn't prevent Jenna, now 26 and married, from having brushes with the law against underage drinking.

Monkman feels White House children look back fondly on their years there, but Wead, the former Bush aide, sees a down side — what he calls a "crisis of identity," the inability of a president's child to ever escape being defined as just that, no matter what they achieve later in life.

Such considerations are premature for the Obama children. A more current question: Would they become part of the prankster tradition? Early practitioners include Tad Lincoln, who once hitched two goats to a chair and barreled into a sitting room where his unamused mother was giving a tour. Quentin Roosevelt, son of Teddy, ran his toy wagon straight through a priceless painting of a first lady; another time he nearly toppled a 350-pound bust of Martin Van Buren.

John Kennedy Jr. so liked the hiding place in his father's desk that he had to be removed occasionally by an aide before important business could be done. And sister Caroline, now vetting vice presidential prospects for Obama, is clearly much more tightlipped at 50 than she was as a child, when, asked by reporters what her father was doing one day, she replied, "Oh, he's upstairs with his shoes and socks off, not doing anything."

And there was Alice Roosevelt, who got into so many shenanigans that her father, Teddy, seemed to give up.

"I can do one of two things," he was quoted as saying. "I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice."

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