Hoda Kotb has revealed that her daughter’s diabetes played a role in her January exit from the Today show.

Returning to the NBC morning show, as a guest, on Wednesday Kotb revealed that her youngest daughter, Hope, has Type 1 diabetes. And she said in an interview with Today.com that while spending more time with her daughters, Hope and Haley, was the main reason she left the show, as she said prior to her exit, Hope’s condition “definitely weighed in.”

“As anyone with a child who has Type 1 (knows), especially a little kid, you’re constantly watching, you’re constantly monitoring, you’re constantly checking, which is what I did all the time when I was (at Today). You’re distracted.”

“You just get a priority check in your life,” Hoda added on Today. “I can be here and sweating what’s happening to Hope in the morning and in the night, or I can be there and feel relief that I can see.”

Speaking to People magazine for a new cover story, Kotb explained that it was a struggle for her to be available to care for Hope with the demands of a morning show schedule, including hard deadlines, call times and a 3:15 a.m. wake-up call.

“I really wanted to and needed to be here to watch over her. So, whenever she needs anything, and it can happen at night, multiple times, I’m up — I’m up up up,” Kotb told People. “But I would never, ever want Hope to one day grow up and say, ‘Oh, my mom left her job because [of me].’ It wasn’t that alone. But if you look at it cumulatively, it was a part of that decision.” 

Kotb also shared that Hope’s diabetes was behind her two-week absence from Today in February 2023, which was explained as simply a “family health matter” and then that Hope had been hospitalized due to a sudden, unspecified illness. The then-four-year-old spent several days in the ICU and a little over a week in the hospital.

Hope’s early symptoms made it so that she “looked like she had the flu, and we literally had to race to the hospital.

“And you get there and you realize that it’s not that at all. And it took us going to the hospital to figure it out,” she added to Today.com.

Kotb, who announced in September that she was leaving Today before her emotional farewell on Jan. 10, returned Wednesday to share an update on her life and announce the launch of her new wellness app and platform Joy 101.

As for Hope’s condition now, she’s “fine for most of the day. There are just moments where you have to watch her,” Kotb said.

“I was totaling it up — five minutes at breakfast, five minutes at lunch, five minutes at dinner, sometimes overnight. Add that up, that’s a half-hour,” she added. “So for 23 and a half hours, she’s every other kid. So I try to remember that.”

She told People that she and her family have settled into a care routine that’s working but she still has to keep an eye on her kid.

“It’s kind of constant care for Hope. We’re monitoring her 24/7,” Kotb said. “She was getting shots — four or five a day — every day for a year. Now she is getting them less frequently because we have some other means to get her what she needs, but there’s a lot to it, Some kids can have sweets and she can’t. If she’s up in the night, we have to take care of her at night.”

After leaving Today, Kotb is waking up at 4:30 a.m., she told People, which she considers “sleeping in” and meditates and writes in her journal before her kids wake up. And in addition to enjoying taking her kids to school and spending time with them in the afternoons, Kotb is working from home and enjoying a more leisurely life.

“I pick up my guitar a lot more just because I can,” Kotb told People. “I go on walks with the other moms from the burbs here after dinner and I love that. Things I didn’t do before because I was too tired.” 

And she can see that her kids are happy to have her around. “Sometimes I’m right there working in my office, and they’ll run up to the window and wave to me and throw up a heart [with their hands],” she told People. “They’re fine because they want me to be here, they’re just happy to see me, and then they’ll go off and play.”

Kotb revealed in September that she planned to leave NBC’s Today show, later setting Jan. 10, 2025 as her last day.

“I just turned 60, and it was such a monumental moment for me when I turned 60 years old, because I started thinking about that decade, like, what does that decade mean? What does it hold? What’s it going to have for me? And I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60 and to try something new,” Kotb said during her on-air announcement. “I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of the time pie that I have,” she added. “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.”

Kotb, who had served as Today co-anchor alongside Guthrie since 2018, was replaced as co-anchor of the show’s first two hours by Craig Melvin. As for her gig co-hosting the fourth hour of Today alongside Bush Hager, Bush Hager has been welcoming a revolving door of guest co-hosts for what’s now dubbed Today With Jenna & Friends.

Since leaving Today, she’s spending more time with her daughters and continuing with her Making Space podcast. Kotb is also set to release a book this fall, Jump and Find Joy: Embracing Chaos in Every Season of Life.