When Judy Blume handed Jenna Bush Hager a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the Today show co-host had an immediate instinct: pass it straight to her 13-year-old daughter, Mila, whose name happens to match the novel’s heroine.
Blume, now 88, had a different idea entirely, and the advice she gave has resonated far beyond a single book recommendation.
Jenna shared the story during a recent appearance on the Las Culturistas podcast, hosted by Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. She described her excitement at the name connection and her plan to hand the book directly to Mila.
Blume shut that down immediately. “She doesn’t want a recommendation from her mother,” Blume told her, as Jenna recounted on the podcast. “Hide it somewhere and let her find it.”
Jenna laughed recalling the exchange, and said the guidance felt exactly right. Reflecting on Blume’s advice about teen self-discovery, Jenna told the podcast hosts, “Kids need to be empowered to find their own sort of way.”
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that cuts to the heart of how children form genuine connections with books, hobbies, and interests. When a parent hands something over with obvious enthusiasm and expectation attached, the experience changes.
The child is no longer discovering something; she’s receiving an assignment.
Why Blume’s Instinct Lines Up With Child Development Research
Blume’s advice wasn’t just charming literary wisdom. It reflects a principle that child psychologists and parenting researchers have documented for years.
Child and adolescent psychotherapist Katie Hurley, writing in The Happy Kid Handbook, argues that passion fundamentally cannot be manufactured or transferred from parent to child. In a piece for Psychology Today on nurturing children’s passions, Hurley explains that passion occurs when enthusiasm is present, and that it is not a trajectory for a successful life but something far more personal and self-directed.
Pushing children toward a specific interest, even one you love deeply yourself, risks crowding out the very self-exploration that makes passion meaningful.
Hurley also cautions against what she calls the tendency to confuse passion with specialization, noting that parents who try to engineer their child’s enthusiasms often do so at the expense of the open-ended play and exploration that actually produces lasting interests.
The rock collection a kid obsesses over at age eight may give way to violin at twelve, and neither outcome can be predicted or forced.
That same principle shows up in practical parenting guidance as well. Experts at The Company of Dads note that encouraging independence over hobbies and interests means resisting the urge to micromanage or dictate how a child engages with something they love.
Rather than steering, the more effective approach is to create conditions where discovery can happen naturally, then step back. Imposing your own interests, even with the best intentions, can create an unspoken expectation that makes the activity feel like a performance rather than a pleasure.
The Mila Connection Goes Deeper Than A Name
The story has an extra layer of warmth to it. Mila is already a Judy Blume fan in her own right, entirely independent of her mother’s influence. Jenna recounted to People magazine a Zoom call she had with Blume when Mila wandered into the room.
Jenna introduced them, and Mila’s response was immediate: “You wrote the first chapter book I ever read,” Mila told Blume, as Jenna recounted to People. Jenna’s reaction, as she told People, was simply, “How amazing is that?”
That moment, a teenager recognizing an author not because her mother told her to, but because the books had already found her, is precisely the outcome Blume’s advice was designed to protect. Mila didn’t need a recommendation. She had already arrived there on her own.
Jenna And Blume’s Relationship Extends Beyond Books
The bond between Jenna and Blume runs deeper than a single podcast anecdote. Jenna is currently producing a screen adaptation of Blume’s coming-of-age novel Summer Sisters, set on Martha’s Vineyard.
In 2023, she selected the book as a Read With Jenna pick to mark its 25th anniversary. Blume, speaking on the Today show, said, “I was thrilled to learn that Jenna read the book every summer, knows the story and characters so well and is bringing it to a wider audience.”
Judy Blume built a career writing books that teenagers found on their own, often in secret, often passed between friends in hallways rather than handed down by parents.
That underground quality, the sense that the book belonged to the reader and not to any adult who approved of it, is part of what made her work so formative for generations of young readers. Her advice to Jenna wasn’t just practical; it was a reminder that the most powerful reading experiences tend to be the ones children claim for themselves.
For parents who love books and want to share that love, the hardest and most generous thing you can do is sometimes leave the right book somewhere findable, and then walk away.
