Jenna Bush Hager Remembers ‘Big Fights’ with George W. Bush over Her Bad Grades

Jenna Bush Hager opened up about a childhood struggle she had with her dad, former President George W. Bush, while discussing parenting on Today with Jenna & Friends on Friday, Sept. 26. 

After discussing one parent’s back-to-school expectations from a recent viral TikTok, Bush Hager admitted there were times she struggled in school.

“There was a period of time when I made bad grades,” the mother of Mila, 12, Poppy, 10, and Hal, 6, shared.

“And how would your parents handle it?” guest co-host Sheinelle Jones asked. 

“My dad would sit with me at that kitchen table and try to teach me math, and we’d get in big fights and I’d cry myself to sleep,” Bush Hager said, laughing. 

Early struggles aside, the 43-year-old TV personality went on to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin and later became a teacher at a charter school before getting into the world of television.

Bush Hager is known for her candor when it comes to the highs and lows of her teenage years. 

“I hope my daughters are NOT like me,” she quipped on Thursday’s show this week. 

Jones, who helped co-host Today with Jenna & Friends this week, said of parenting, “If I have a little Jenna, I wouldn’t even know how to parent that.”

“My parents didn’t either,” Bush Hager joked of her father, George, and former first lady Laura Bush. 

And it wasn’t just grades that the former first daughter gave her parents a hard time with. During Friday’s episode, Jones shared that she had played an April Fools prank on her mother in college, telling her she was pregnant.

“Oh my god! I did the same thing!” Bush Hager admitted. However, when she was in college, her father was in the middle of his first term as president of the United States.