Hoda Kotb drew a line after 6-year-old daughter Haley asked to wear a crop top.
The Today with Hoda & Jenna, cohost, 58, revealed during the Monday, June 12, episode that her eldest child recently asked about wearing a belly shirt. “So Haley wants to wear a midriff. She asked me about a midriff,” Kotb told her coanchor Jenna Bush Hager.
“She was walking down the street and she goes, ‘Hi mom,’ and she pulled [her shirt] up halfway. I go, ‘What are you doing?’ She’s like, ‘Nothing,’ and she’s giggling out of her mind,” Kotb explained.
Bush Hager, 41, suggested that perhaps she wanted to copy the trends of teenage fashion, but Kotb said her daughter doesn’t know any teenage girls to see the style.
“It’s weird! You want your kids to feel good in your own skin — but isn’t that a weird thing?” Kotb said. “I said, ‘No. No, we’re not doing that.’”
The Oklahoma native — who adopted Haley as well as Hope, 3, with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman — shared that she struggles with when to give her little girl independence.
“I often wrestle with making your kid in charge or in control and then saying no,” she explained. “We always do the, ‘Do you want blueberries or raspberries? Do you want to wear pink or red? You pick! See, you can choose! See you have some control!’ Then I wonder, what are we doing? Even though that’s what parenting is now, sometimes you wonder if you have one choice … sometimes it has gotta be no, don’t you think?”
Kotb has been open about raising her children and trying to give them strong values. The NBC personality exclusively told Us Weekly last year that she’s raising her daughters to do good in the world and show kindness to others.
“I always say I want my kids to be happy and of service — those two things … I want my kids to realize that there is such a beautiful feeling when you hand someone something … somebody who doesn’t have something,” Kotb exclusively told Us in December 2022 amid the holiday season.
She added, “I’m really proud because we had dinner last night together, we had a date and my daughter, she said, ‘Hey Mom, can we pay for that table over there?’ And we looked at this table and she goes, ‘But we don’t tell ’em right?’ I go, ‘We don’t tell ’em.’ So she picked the table, she did it herself. It had nothing to do with me. So, I was thinking that I wanna start building on that more with them and that the holidays are the perfect time.”