My digital project, All Eyes on Us, is a podcast that discusses and analyzes the lives of presidential children. Although not all of them were children during their father’s presidency, I will still refer to them as children. This project aims to delve into their personal lives and learn from their experiences. Their stories provide an interesting perspective into the daily routine of the White House. Not only were their families the center of the public’s eye, but also the eyes of the secret service. Therefore, my project aims to answer the question, How were their lives affected living under such close watch?” The project will focus on why they made certain decisions, and how their decisions were affected by their relationship with their family and the public.
I decided to go this route with my project for a few reasons. The first is that I realized how little I knew about the presidential children. I realized that maybe other people in the field of history had the same curiosities as myself. The second reason was that there are a lot of stigmas today concerning mental health. Many people do not realize how poor mental health can affect a person at any age. Therefore, I thought this project would be an interesting combination of these two realizations.
While creating this project, I needed to decide whether I wanted to host the show alone or have a co-host. This was a difficult choice because I was unsure of how this would affect the flow of the narrative. However, I managed to intertwine the narrative of the podcast with a constructive conversation about our main topics/themes. I believe that it was a good decision to have a co-host for this podcast. This decision was practical for me considering my co-host is my roommate. It made planning the episode much easier as I always have her in the same house as me. This was also an intellectual decision for me. The podcast is not only discussing and bringing awareness to certain historical figures. It is also mental health and familial issues. I figured that if I wanted to open the conversation up to others, a good example would be to show a comfortable conversation about these difficult subjects.
