Hoda Kotb Doesn't Feel "Any Ounce Of Shame" For Being An Older Mom
And she shouldn't!
More and more women are choosing to have children later in their life. The mean age for when a woman decides to become a first-time mom continues to rise each year. While more women are choosing to live a longer child-free life prior to being a parent, there is still stigma around being an “older mom” and waiting longer to have kids is a great reason for trolls on the internet to mom shame.
Today co-host Hoda Kotb isn’t having any of that.
On a recent episode of Today with Jenna and Hoda, Kotb, 59, opened up about her decision to be an older mom as actor Sienna Miller’s recent Vogue interview was the topic of conversation. Miller spoke about being pregnant aged 41.
Kotb — who welcomed her first child at 52 — is mom to daughters Hope, 4, and Haley, 6. She adopted her daughters with her ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman. The two split in January 2022.
During her interview with Vogue, Miller said, “I’d love to get to a point where I didn’t feel the need to make a joke of my being older and having a baby. To show I'm in on the joke.”
Kotb understood where the actor was coming from with her experience, saying, “I think a lot of people do that, like you want to beat them to the punch, so you make the joke about, ‘Hi, I'm an older mom,’ or if you feel heavy … you make the joke about it. I was always a fat kid. That's the joke you make so no one else can make it.”
Though she doesn’t feel the same.
"I am so happy and fulfilled with my decision that I don't feel any ounce of shame,” she said.
"Hoda doesn't feel like she needs a joke," Kotb’s co-host Jenna Bush Hager added as Kotb nodded her head in agreement.
"Because she's so delighted by them that when you lead with delight, guess what follows? Delight! When you lead with enthusiasm and this has to do with everything, people are enthusiastic back."
"I love that you're totally secure in it," Bush Hager, 42, said to her co-host, who called her daughters “the best decisions I've ever made."
Despite her security in her decision, people have still haven’t always been kind to Kotb.
In 2020, she revealed that she received a physical letter shaming her for choosing to be a mom later in life.
“I got a physical letter in the mail… from a woman who wrote, ‘Who do you think you are, having kids at that age?’ ” she said. “I literally read it and thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe someone put a stamp on it and sent it.'”
Kotb “literally tore it up,” confessing she “felt horrible in that moment, because there is something that bothers you inside about that.”
“But then I thought, ‘Who would take a piece of paper and a pen and write that and fold it and put it in the envelope with a stamp and go to the trouble of mailing it?’ It took effort,” she continued.
Despite that troubled person’s effort, Kotb led with compassion and realized that she wasn’t the issue here. Kotb loves being an older mom, and she’s not alone.
In 2021, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) reported 1,041 births to women aged 50 and over in the United States. This is 10 times higher than in 1997, when only 144 births to women in this age group were reported. In 2013, births to women over 50 amounted to 0.02% of total births. In 2013, an average of 13 children were born every week to mothers 50 years and older.
