Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb are bonding over their kids’ bewildering use of the word “bro.”
During the Wednesday, December 13, episode of Today With Hoda & Jenna, the cohosts discussed a viral TikTok video in which a middle school math teacher rattled off the slang terms he’d learned from his students.
“How about this? You know which one [word] my kids use a lot and they are six and four? Bruh,” Kotb, 59, said of daughters Haley and Hope, respectively, whom she shares with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman.
Hager, 42 — who shares daughters Mila, 10, and Poppy, 8, and son Hal, 4, with husband Henry Hager — quickly chimed in: “[My kids] call me bro. Why would they call us, their loving mothers, bro?”
Kotb, for her part, made it clear that she doesn’t put up with her daughters using the term to address her.
“I always say to my kids, ‘You do not call your mother bro,’” she quipped, eliciting laughs from the audience.
Bush Hager, however, hasn’t had the same success with putting her foot down. She told Kotb that her kids are also fond of calling her by her full name.
“Wait, they call you Jenna Bush in your own house?” Kotb asked in disbelief, prompting Bush Hager to exclaim, “All the time!”
She continued: “All of them, all three of them gang up against me and I’m like, ‘You wanna try mom?’ And they’re like, ‘You call me Mila, I call you Jenna.'”
A shocked Kotb replied: “You’re losing the fight. No, you’ve lost the fight.”
Bush Hager agreed, admitting: “It’s gone.”
The twosome also discussed Mila’s use of the word “preppy” — which Bush Hager explained kids now use as a synonym for “cool” as opposed to a characterization of style — and another, slightly off-color phrase they’ve heard children use.
Kotb shared that she’d heard her daughters say “what the?!” without filling in the implied expletive. She was confused as to where they’d picked it up until she heard it out in public.
“I was walking with my kids home from school and and a kid on a scooter came up and almost side swiped me, and he looks at me and he goes, ‘What the?’” Kotb recalled. “He was my kids’ age, so is that what they’re saying?”
Bush Hager confirmed Kotb’s theory, saying: “I think they’re saying ‘what the?’ on the playground.”
