Chelsea Clinton’s Childhood: Even Stranger Than We Thought

We already know that the only child of Hillary and Bill Clinton grew up with lots of rules: no sugary cereals, very limited TV time, and no pizza eating or cartoon watching during the week.

We also know that she withstood plenty of bizarre situations — having her bushy hair and braces mocked on "Saturday Night Live" during adolescence (the horror!), standing next to Michael Jackson for a rendition of “We Are the World,” and having to read the entire report on the Monica Lewinsky affair when she was a teen, for starters.

And now we’ve got even more interesting tidbits from the notoriously private Chelsea Clinton, 33.

“One of my most formative memories was during the 1986 gubernatorial election in Arkansas, which was a really nasty election,” Clinton recalled during an appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” Thursday night. There was a big debate coming up for her father, she said, and “The three of us, over many evenings and weekends, would play different roles in advance of this debate. So I would have to pretend to be my father’s opponent and argue positions against him,” Clinton said.

“How old were you?” Stewart asked.

“I was six,” she replied — to audience laughs — adding, “Sometimes I would be my father and he would be his opponent. So I was taught to hold my own at a pretty early age.”

Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, also talked about her decision to stay in the family business.

“I tried really hard to want to denominate success in my life differently than my parents, because I think most kids probably don’t want to grow up and feel like they’ve defaulted into whatever their parents have done,” she said. “But ultimately I did really care about what my parents cared about, and that’s what I wanted to work on. I’m still trying to make my parents proud.”