During Today With Hoda and Jenna episode, Jenna Bush Hager recalled an upsetting experience she had with body shaming when she was in the seventh grade.
“It’s so interesting because people really do hit you right where it hurts,” Bush Hager said while speaking with Hoda Kotb about Ariana Grande’s recent response to the concerns and criticisms of her body.
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“I had a boyfriend in seventh grade who broke up with me after we went swimming together,” she revealed before adding “after he saw me in a bathing suit.” The mom of three, 41, explained that the breakup still impacts her to this day, saying that “I feel like even sometimes now when I feel great — I have three kids, three C-sections, I feel really in my body and I think of it as a beautiful thing — I’ll walk in a pool and have a moment.”
The former first daughter explained that it was experiences like this that made her want to raise her kids to be kind and affectionate. “All we want is loving children. We don’t need the star kid, the this, the that. We want kids that are kind,” Bush Hager said of her and husband Henry Hager’s parenting approach for their daughters Mila, 9, and Poppy, 7, and son Hal, 3.
“The way you do that is model it,” she said, highlighting the importance of setting an example.
