How ‘Today’s Jenna Bush Hager Is Helping Her Daughter Deal With Mean Girls
What To Know
- Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones reveal what they’ve taught their daughters about dealing with mean girls at school.
- Both Bush Hager and Jones are parents to three children.
- The journalists preached kindness and being a good friend, and urged parents to eliminate the “pressure” put on their children.
Now that Jenna Bush Hager‘s eldest child, daughter Mila, is a preteen, the Today host is making sure to instill kindness, while also guiding the 12-year-old to surround herself with those who will treat her the same way.
“I feel like we live in this world where, and I don’t know where it comes from, but there’s this intense pressure on teens to get into the right school, to be the best athlete, to have the best grades, and we didn’t have that [growing up] at all,” Bush Hager said on the April 9 episode of Today With Jenna & Sheinelle. “If you were average, you were fine.”
She continued, “I also think it’s the emphasis on achievement and success, rather than happiness and joy and kindness and friendship.”
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Bush Hager pointed out that parents should “help put the emphasis on things that matter, as opposed to pressuring all of these external things that don’t really matter.” To do so with Mila, Bush Hager offered up advice she learned from Brené Brown.
“[She] talks about finding the people that brag on you, that make you feel good,” the journalist explained. “She has this podcast where she talks about the candle-blowers. Imagine you were like, ‘I have a book out,’ and I’m like, ‘So what, I wrote a book?’ as opposed to being like, ‘My girl has a book out!'”
Sheinelle Jones clarified, “You want the person who isn’t going to blow out your candle,” and Bush Hager agreed, adding, “I feel like that is such a good thing to teach your kids.”
As a mother of three teenagers herself, Jones has already had to give her 13-year-old daughter the “mean girls” talk. “Here’s what I tell my daughter: They peak too soon,” she shared. “Unless they’re kind. But if you’re not kind, if you’re the mean girl … because what you think about, you bring about. And kindness helps, and being the one who helps someone, and you’re a best friend … that’s what you want to foster.”
In addition to Mila, Bush Hager and husband Henry Hager also share daughter Poppy and son Hal. Jones has three children (son Kayin and twins Clara and Uche Jr.) with her late husband, Uche Ojeh.
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