Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura Bush, are parents to two daughters: Barbara and Jenna

Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty

George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States, and his wife, Laura Bush, have two adult daughters: twins Barbara Pierce Bush and Jenna Welch Bush Hager.

Barbara and Jenna have lived much of their lives in the spotlight. They were only 7 years old when their grandfather, George H.W. Bush, was inaugurated as the 41st president. When the twins were 20, in 2001, George W. followed in his father’s footsteps and became president. As he later told Newsweek, his daughters weren’t entirely thrilled with his decision to run for the highest office.

George recalled Jenna telling him, “Oh, I just wish you wouldn’t run. It’s going to change our life,” to which he replied, “You know, Jenna, your mother and I are living our lives. And that’s what we raised you and Barbara to do: live yours.”

The former president has been open about how much his daughters mean to him. In 2015, when he received a “Father of the Year” award, he revealed that becoming a dad made him want to get sober after struggling with alcohol use.

“I think the most important priority for a dad is to be a dad,” he said in his speech, according to The Dallas Morning News. “In my case, I might have been slightly self-absorbed at times, but when I became a dad, I only had one real job, and that was to provide for these little girls. Was I always successful? I don’t know. They can be the witnesses.”

George W. Bush and Mrs. Laura Bush pose with daughters Jenna (R) and Barbara (L) prior to the wedding of Jenna and Henry Hager May 10, 2008 near Crawford, Texas. Shealah Craighead/The White House

Despite his high-profile job, Jenna has said that her father did everything he could to give the girls a normal life. “When my dad became president, he was like, ‘Don’t worry. You can be normal,’ ” she recalled during one Today show episode. “He just wanted to give us what we wanted, but obviously we couldn’t. But I think he really believed that.”

Both Jenna and Barbara have since gone on to foster high-profile careers of their own. Barbara is an activist involved in several nonprofit initiatives, while Jenna co-anchors the Today show.

In addition to their separate endeavors, the sisters, who have five kids between them, have teamed up on several projects, authoring a memoir and four children’s books and co-founding a nonprofit organization.

Jenna told PEOPLE that their latest children’s book, I Loved You First, which hit bookshelves on March 25, is a “call to action” for busy parents.

“It’s like, ‘Hey, put the phone down. You only have so long with your kids,’ ” she said. “If you can see the world through your kids’ eyes, it’s so optimistic and joyful and creative.”

Here’s everything to know about Barbara and Jenna Bush.

Barbara Bush, 43

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty

Barbara Bush was born on Nov. 25, 1981, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. She was named after her paternal grandmother, Barbara Pierce Bush. She and Jenna grew up in Texas, first attending school in Dallas before the family moved to Austin after their father was elected governor. After graduating from Austin High School in 1996 — where she was crowned homecoming queen — she attended Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Known as the more reserved Bush daughter, Barbara opted for a career path that kept her largely out of the spotlight. After traveling to Africa with her parents for the launch of the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Barbara was confronted with the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“I mean seeing literally like thousands of people lining the street waiting for drugs that they needed to live, that we had in the United States, was something that was very hard for me to wrap my brain around,” she told ELLE in 2013. “The lack of justice in that.”

After graduating from Yale, she returned to Africa to volunteer at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital and interned for Baylor College of Medicine’s International Pediatrics AIDS Initiative.

In 2009, she took her activism a step further and, along with her sister, launched Global Health Corps, a nonprofit organization that offers a fellowship to support emerging global health leaders and strives to make healthcare more inclusive and equitable. After running the organization for nearly 10 years, she announced in 2018 that she was transitioning into the role of board chair, though she still remains actively involved.

In 2011, Barbara took a stand for LGBTQ+ rights when she released a video with the Human Rights Campaign calling for the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York. “I am Barbara Bush, and I am a New Yorker for marriage equality,” she said in the video. “New York is about fairness and equality. And everyone should have the right to marry the person that they love.”

Barbara has shown that she has some different political views from her Republican father, though she doesn’t formally affiliate with any party. “I don’t really label myself as Republican or Democrat,” she previously told PEOPLE.

Barbara also supports organizations like Planned Parenthood. In 2017, she gave a keynote speech at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser, saying, “To me, Planned Parenthood is a one-stop shop for everything that has to do with women’s health and all social problems that don’t have to do with women’s health. I hope you all realize the incredible investment that you’re making for both women and also their kids, their kids’ education and their income level. And that is unique and incredible. It’s a silver bullet, if you ask me.”

Barbara Pierce Bush with her daughter Cora. Laura Foote

Aside from working with charities and running a non-profit, Barbara is an author. In 2017, she and Jenna wrote a joint memoir, Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life. In 2019, the pair teamed up again and wrote a children’s book called It’s All About Sisterhood.

In October 2018, Barbara married Craig Coyne in a secret and intimate wedding ceremony at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. Only 20 people were in attendance and Barbara described it as “a very short, sweet ceremony” to PEOPLE. Six months later, she had a larger second wedding in Texas to celebrate with friends and family.

Barbara became a mom when she gave birth to her daughter, Cora Georgia, on Sept. 27, 2021, in Maine. Three years later, she and Coyne welcomed their second child, son Edward Finn.

Jenna Bush Hager, 43

Todd Owyoung/NBC

Like her sister, Jenna Bush Hager was born on Nov. 25, 1981, at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas. She is named after her maternal grandmother, Jenna Hawkins Welch.

After attending the University of Texas at Austin, where she got her bachelor’s degree in English, she worked as a teacher for several years, first teaching third grade in Washington, D.C., before moving to Baltimore to work as a reading resource teacher.

Jenna also began to pursue other interests, and in 2007, she authored her first book, Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, which is based on the life of a 17-year-old single mother with HIV and was inspired by her travels through Latin America. Jenna has gone on to write several books; in addition to the two she co-authored with Barbara, she released a children’s book titled Read All About It! alongside her mother, Laura, in 2008 and later released her own children’s book, Our Great Big Backyard, in 2016.

While volunteering on her father’s campaign, Jenna met Henry Hager, who was working for one of her father’s advisers. On Nov. 29, 2022, Jenna appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, where she was asked about the time Henry was caught sneaking out of the White House after spending the night. “Well, he was caught, that was the problem,” Jenna said, laughing.

She went on to note that the secret service’s top concern wasn’t a “26-year-old in the night-before clothes,” as their job wasn’t to make sure she wasn’t “hooking up.”

After the two got engaged in 2007, they tied the knot in 2008 at her father’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. She later recalled her wedding day on Today in 2021, saying, “I remember seeing Henry clearly, standing there at this cross that my dad had helped build for us. It’s still there, so we have our Christmas services there that we put together. Our kids have gotten to stand on it.”

Two years later, Jenna opened up about an embarrassing moment from the night before her wedding. “My sister and I spent the night [on] the night before [my husband and I] got married, and my mom came in [singing] ‘You’re getting married! Let’s go change the sheets!’ ” Jenna recalled on a May 4, 2023, episode of Today with Hoda & Jenna. “And Barbara goes, ‘Eww gross, mom! This isn’t The Other Boleyn Girl!’ “

Her journey at Today began in 2009, when she was offered a job as a correspondent. Despite initially being hesitant about the role, Jenna told PEOPLE her grandparents talked her into it.

“That’s kind of what our family has given us,” she said. “They have allowed us to take risks and hope that everything works the way we want it to.”

In 2019, Jenna replaced Kathie Lee Gifford as the co-host of Today alongside Hoda Kotb. “It feels organic and it feels right, which I don’t know if I would do it if it didn’t,” she told PEOPLE. “They probably wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it didn’t. But it just feels like the right time for me.”

Jenna became a mother when she and Hager welcomed their first daughter, Margaret Laura “Mila” Hager, on April 13, 2013. Their family grew twice more with the arrival of their second daughter, Poppy Louise Hager, on Aug. 13, 2015, and their first son, Henry Harold “Hal” Hager, on Aug. 2, 2019.

Jenna Bush Hager Instagram

While Jenna describes her kids as the joys of her life, she admits her path to motherhood had a “painful” aspect. During an appearance on the Making Space podcast in 2021, she discussed what it was like to get married and have kids before her sister.

“We had a really shared history because we were the same age. So it’s interesting how adulthood happens and how I just met Henry and that she didn’t meet somebody, you know, she had a lot of boyfriends. And people always asked about it,” Jenna recalled of their diverging paths, noting that it was “disheartening” when people would ask her sister why she wasn’t married or having children.

After Barbara welcomed a daughter of her own, Jenna said she was looking forward to sharing their children’s milestones together. “It’ll be really fun to watch her become a mom and she’s FaceTiming me with the baby, feeding the baby a bottle and all of those, like, wondering what we should do for Halloween — like all of these things that were our narratives are coming back together, and I just can’t wait to watch her become a mom,” she said.

In October 2022, Jenna opened up to PEOPLE about finding joy in the “parts of mothering that are tedious and can be boring.”

“What I try to do is think that is life, those tedious parts are also that’s what we’re doing, that’s what we’re living,” she explained. “I try to find the love and the pleasure that I know I have for my kids even in the tedious parts of parenting.”

In addition to being a mom and Today co-host, Jenna maintains an active social media presence, regularly sharing behind-the-scenes moments from Today on her Instagram profile along with snaps of her kids and family. She also runs a popular book club, #ReadWithJenna, and shares a new book with her followers on Instagram each month.

In September 2022, Jenna documented an important family milestone on Instagram — taking her kids to the White House for the first time! “A magical night we will never forget!” she captioned a photo of her, Hager and their two daughters smiling with mom Laura.

She later reflected how special it was to show Poppy and Mila her historic former home for the first time during an episode of Today: “It was just very wild to walk around — like my mom was showing them, ‘That’s where Jenna and Barbara had a room.’”