TODAY Star Wants to Do This With Her Kids After Leaving the Show

Published: December 20, 2024

TODAY Star Wants to Do This With Her Kids After Leaving the Show

By Movieguide® Contributor

After 17 years on the TODAY show, Hoda Kotb is looking forward to finally taking her kiddos to school.

“It’s funny,” Kotb told Christian country singer Walker Hayes on her “Making Space” podcast Dec. 18. “When I was mentioning here that I was going to leave the TODAY show, one of our producers came upstairs in the makeup room, and she said, ‘I want to say something to you.’ She goes, ‘My mother walking me to school every day was the best memory I’ve ever had.'”

“And all I want to do is walk my kids to school. And it’s the simplest thing, with a cup of coffee, walking your kids to school. But all the little things, you get to see growth,” said the mom of Haley, 7, and Hope, 5.

In September, Kotb announced that she would leave TODAY. She’s spent 26 years with NBC News and will remain there in a different role as she steps into a different pace of life. Her last day on the show is Jan. 10.

“I was telling them, ‘Mommy is going to be able to take you to school,’ and they go, ‘(Gasp) Wednesday?’ ‘No honey, not Wednesday.’ ‘Next week?’ I go, ‘No honey, not next week. Probably somewhere January, February,’” she said in October.

She’s happy that she will be more present for her kids.

“You know what, you just have a feeling when you watch them grow,” she said. “I was like, they need a little more of me, and I need more of them. And, so, I think it’s all going to work out beautifully.”

“Obviously I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie that I have,” she said. “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.”

Kotb previously talked about the difficulties of being a celebrity TV host and a parent.

“There’s the guilt you carry because you can’t be 100 percent at work and 100 percent at home,” she told PEOPLE. “Something has to give if you want excellence.”

“If you’re going to be excellent at work, something has to give at home. And if you want to be excellent at home — I mean excellent and do all the things — something has to give at work,” she continued. “It can’t be equal.”

Her co-host, Savannah Guthrie, is sad to see Kotb go.

She said, “Honestly, I don’t think any of us can imagine – we don’t want to imagine this place without you. So it’s complicated, because we love you so much and we don’t want you to ever go. But also, I just want to say, I am so proud of my friend.”

When Kotb originally told Guthrie that she was leaving, Guthrie told her, “I’m going to be sad for me and for our show later, but not today. Today’s the day that I say, wow, you’re doing it.”