KAILUA (Hawaii): When they vacationed here just before President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Malia and Sasha were little girls doting on their dad — holding his hand on the beach, taking in a dolphin show and nuzzling up to him at the shave-ice shop.

Now, six Christmases later, the presidential daughters are in their teens, both nearly as tall as their very tall mother, each developing her own style and leading an increasingly independent life.

Although they have watched a basketball game, gone for a hike and hit the beach with their dad, he has spent most afternoons here on the golf course with his buddies while the girls have gone about their business without him.

The Obamas’ annual holiday vacation, at a lush and secluded surf-side retreat in Kailua, has underscored just how much their family dynamic has evolved in the five years since they moved into the White House.

As his girls grow into young women, the president has been increasingly nostalgic in public, lamenting how quickly time has slipped by. “Those of us who have kids know how fast it goes, because Malia and Sasha, they’re like weeds,” Obama said at a November fundraiser.

“They’re just growing up so fast, and they’ve got a busy life of their own,” Obama told People magazine. “You can project out over the next several years how, between school, sports, social life, their community service, they’re not around as much. So that gets me teary sometimes.”

Malia, 15, is a high school sophomore and tennis player whom her father describes as lawyerly. She has shed her braces and is allowed to date. Sasha, 12, is a seventh-grader and basketball player who has been called a “budding style icon” by fashion bloggers. Some of her clothing choices have been highlighted in glossy fashion-magazine columns.

The Obama girls are among the youngest children to live in the White House in modern times. The president and first lady have tried to keep their daughters’ lives as normal as possible under the circumstances — the girls must make their own beds and they keep the children off-limits to the news media to give them a modicum of privacy.

Although for all their parents’ efforts at creating normalcy, the Obama teens enjoy a range of experiences unimaginable to their peers. They have become friendly with celebrities, including Beyonce and Jay-Z. Malia sat in on an Oval Office meeting with her parents and Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani education activist.

The president and first lady have described in recent interviews a set of rigid rules designed to protect the daughters from negative influences (although the president has said that Malia has been pushing back on her parents’ restrictions lately).

The girls are not allowed to watch TV on weekdays unless it is school-related. Neither daughter was allowed a cellphone before age 12, and their mother has warned them of the risk of having a bratty moment caught on a smartphone and going viral. Their parents say that Sasha is still too young for social media and that Malia’s screen time on Facebook is limited. Still, it was Malia and Sasha who introduced their parents to other social media. “You know, Instagram and Vine, those are things that I first heard from them,” the president told People.

Politically, however, the president may need more than family nostalgia can provide at this point, said Elizabeth Mehren, a journalism professor at Boston University who has written about several first families. “The president’s image needs more help than ‘Father Knows Best’ can give him,” Mehren said. She added, “The public has other things on its mind now, not the Obama girls’ growth chart.”

Even as their daughters grow more independent the Obamas are trying to reinforce familiar family rhythms. The president still breaks away from the Oval Office most nights to eat dinner with the girls at 6:30, something they have done since moving to Washington in 2009.

Around the dinner table most of the family’s conversations are focused on the girls’ days at Sidwell Friends, the Washington prep school both attend. The president, Michelle Obama told Vogue this year, is “up on every friend, every party, every relationship.”

The experience of watching his kids grow up has helped make Obama relatable to many Americans, regardless of their politics or station in life. “It humanises the president,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek. “He’s a parent — a doting, affectionate father. And it’s really quite typical. Suddenly you look up and your children are teenagers and those years go by. It’s a familiar kind of lament.”

—By arrangement with the Washington Post