At Home with Kaye Adams

The Loose Women Presenter on the pressure faced by today's parents

You’ve just become a mother for the second time – how are things going? 

Very good actually – Bonnie has a completely different nature from Charly, which took me by surprise. My experience being limited to one child I expected everything to be the same but looking back, Charly clearly had colic – but you don’t really know what it is at the time, all you know is that between 6pm and midnight you have a high old time – which I must admit I found very, very difficult with her, so I don’t look back on that with a great deal of fondness, I’m sad to say.  

I kind of girded my loins for the same experience with Bonnie and it’s not happened – every night since she’s been born we’ve been able to sit and have dinner – but it shows you the inveterate worrier you become when you become a parent, that I thought there was maybe something wrong with her! I actually said to the midwife, are you sure she’s all right, she’s not crying enough and the midwife looked at me as if I was off my head.  

Did you find any support or information about colic that was helpful at the time? 

No, to be honest I was stabbing in the dark, I didn't really even understand what colic was. We just went out and bought any and every remedy we could find and tried them all ... frantically. 

What did begin to help was talking to other parents who were going through or who had gone through the colic experience too. It didn't change anything but it did put it into perspective and allowed us to see this was a tough period but a period that would come to a natural end. That's why I agreed to get involved with Colief’s new ‘A problem shared’ campaign, in conjunction with Cry-sis. It's all about emphasising the need to speak to other parents and exchange information about what worked for them. It certainly saved my sanity.  

How did Charly react to having a little sister? 

She’s been fantastic, really really great, I keep waiting for her to have a wobble and I’m sure she will – which is absolutely fine – but I have to say that nine weeks on the only real problem I have with Charly is suffocating her wee sister – but you’ve got to try and handle that, you can’t keep saying to her, get off, get off, get off!  

You had your pregnancies relatively late in life, Kaye – was that planned at all because of your career? 

No, nothing was planned. The reality is that until I was in my mid-30s I didn’t think about it – it’s not that I had made any decision against it, or I’d even had that discussion with myself, but I woke up one day and thought, yes this is what I do want, and then like a lot of people in their mid 30s find, it didn’t happen quite as easily or as quickly as they thought it would – but it did, eventually, so I’m very happy about that.  

And how have you found coping with the career and parenting? 

When Charly was coming along I did worry a lot. I’m very much a planner which to be honest is a bit of a joke in the line of work that I do – you just can’t – which is always something I’ve struggled with, cause it goes against my grain. I would much rather know what I’m doing, when I’m doing it, how much money it’s going to pull in, but I’ve slowly had to accept over the years that that’s just not an option when you’re doing this kind of work – and when you add a baby into the mix, that just makes you go off the scale. So I did find it very difficult and I would continually find myself looking forward three months, six months, a year, anticipating problems which would come in the future, and then eventually I must have just been worn down and thought I’ve got to just take each day as it comes here, and that was a huge step forward for me.  

I can look back now and say, well, you know we have coped well, Charly’s four and a half, she’s as happy as Larry, we’re all still here and we’re dong fine.  

Has becoming a mother changed your priorities in terms of work? 

Definitely. Before I had Charly I was away five days a week, and then when she came along I cut that right back, and right now I’m thinking I’ll have to have a radical re-look at things – which is probably around the right time for me anyway, I’ve been doing the current show for about six years so it may be time for a change anyway.  

Do you have any idea right now of what the change might be? 

No – I absolutely haven’t a clue! Which again is quite scary for me, cause it’s not the way I usually like to play things, but I’m trying to be philosophical. 

Did you always intend to stay in Glasgow? What made you resist the move to London? 

Yes I did – because if I had moved to London the time to go would have been in my late 20s at the latest, and I’ve been working or away from home really from about 1997, so if I was going to go I should have gone then – but I’m glad I didn’t. 

What made you want to stay in Scotland and not pack up and move south? 

A lot of it is circumstantial – I met my partner Ian about 13 years ago, so that’s probably the time in my career when I would have moved, but I met him and he was based in Glasgow and things just went forward from there – and I felt rooted here and settled and I never had any great urge to go. And in the past 10 years I’ve worked in Norwich, Manchester, London, various other towns, so there was always going to be a lot of travelling and television is famously disloyal to you. If you try and hitch yourself to their wagon, you can find yourself adrift. 

How did you cope with commuting after Charly was born? 

I can’t even remember, all I know is I did. It’s the old guilt factor I suppose, it wasn’t really that difficult but I often made it more difficult for myself, but I just did my best to minimise it – I used to get the sleeper train instead of the plane so I was able to put her to bed and she would be none the wiser that I was actually hurtling through the countryside at night, rather than sleeping in the room next to her. And Ian was great, he’s a tennis coach and his work is fairly flexible and he’s very much an equal parent, so we managed. It eased off a bit when Charly was two, but I probably killed myself a bit until she was that age.  

Also with the show Loose Women, it’s not like it was a 52 week a year thing, it would be a 10 or a 12 week burst so you would go into it saying, okay, the next three months are going to be like this – but after that I’ll have a couple of months when I’m just dodging about closer to home. We’d record two shows a day, so it may have appeared to people that I was away five days a week, but I was never away for more than two breakfasts or two bath times.  

Do you think Glasgow is a good city to bring your kids up in? 

Well I live in the west end of Glasgow, and that isn’t really Glasgow, it’s a relatively sheltered way of life, so you’ve got to be careful saying Glasgow when you actually mean a tiny little bit of it. But this corner of it is a great place to bring up kids.  

You’ve written about parenting paranoia, and the criticism you received when you admitted you’d left Charly in the car when you went to pay at the garage. Do you think as parents we’re just becoming – or being made to feel – more paranoid? 

I do – everything in life is a calculated risk, you know you get into your car and you’re taking a calculate risk. That was kind of difficult for me because the last thing I want is to be seen as someone who plays fast and loose with the safety of their children, I absolutely don’t. But what is the difference between her having a nap in her bedroom and me being in the kitchen? And I refuse to be bullied into that kind of mentality. I did get a lot of reaction to that article, from women – and some blokes – with a sense of relief, confessing that they once did this or they once did that, you know, and none of it was terrible, and obviously they were very caring parents, but they had been made to feel bad about it, and that’s just rubbish. 

So do you think we just need to relax? 

It’s difficult – it’s not a case of blaming the media, but we’re always looking for a story, and we’re always in search of an angle, and we seem to have become very sharp in that direction, and it’s difficult not to be affected by it. So we question ourselves and when I told that story on Loose Women, about paying for the petrol when Charly was sleeping, and I think it was Carole McGiffin who pulled me up on it – who to be fair had a bit of an overdramatic reaction for the sake of television – but actually I was genuinely quite surprised, because it hadn’t occurred to me that I was doing anything wrong! And I did question myself, I thought, was that really a stupid thing to do?  

What made you want to take on the role as UNICEF’s UK Ambassador for Scotland? 

I thought very hard about it, and to be honest I was loathe to take anything else on, but I met with them, and rather than me just taking an instant reaction, we had a long chat about what UNICEF does and how I could help and whether or not what I had to offer them in terms of time was of any value or not, and they said we still think you’d be of use to us, so on that basis I was more than happy to take it on – but it was important to me to say you know, oh yes I’ll be a patron but I was bugger all use to them. So I let them make the decision. Obviously it’s the largest children’s organisation in the world, it’s difficult to describe it as one body because what it does is so far ranging – on a political level, on a field level in the UK and abroad – it’s very difficult to sum it up.  

What has it involved so far? 

In my first year the G8 was held at Gleneagles, and we had a parallel event called C8, which was for children of not just the eight most wealthy nations in the world but the eight least wealthy. We brought them together over a weekend, and had various workshops and a lot of things came out of that, and they delivered a paper to the G8 leaders at Gleneagles.  

More recently I’ve been involved with UNICEF on their baby friendly standard, which is about their only breast feeding standard at work in the UK just now, it’s a bit like Investors in People, a standard for hospitals and other maternity units in terms of them encouraging and facilitating breast feeding.  

What was your reaction to the UNICEF report which put the UK at the bottom of the table for child wellbeing among developed nations? 

I was a bit disappointed in the government’s response to it, which seemed overly defensive.  

I think we have to look at the kind of lives that we as adults lead – and how we’re very quick to criticise children, bad behaviour in children, but everything they do is kind of facilitated by us, and so what occurred to me when I was reading it was that the adult population needs to look at its own behaviour and think to what extent they are contributing to children growing up in this way – you know we can talk about discipline and they watch TV too much these days and they are lazy and don’t go to the park – well that’s all us, that’s not them. Eight-year-olds can moan at you about getting a PlayStation all they like but ultimately it’s your decision – so I really think we need to look at the way we lead our lives – in terms of promiscuity, in terms of drinking, all these things – they take their lead from us.  

So the report should be a wake up call for parents? 

I would like to think so. We were at an event after the Dancing on Ice final in London recently and you go in at 6pm and you get trapped in the studio until about 9.30pm, there’s no food at all, we got a jammy doughnut each, but when you come out they have a party and there’s no food whatsoever, but there’s abundant drink on hand. Ian lived in Italy for years and he was saying, you know this is incredible, in Italy it would be entirely the other way around, you’d come out and there would be a massive buffet, people would want to eat, they may have the occasional glass of wine but the focus would be on food. Our adult culture is very drink focused – so what are our children going to do? Is it any surprise that drink is such a big deal for them – because we made it like that.  

And the final question, Kaye – are you drawing a line with two? 

Oh yes – but I think nature will be drawing the line at two, to be honest. But it’s actually a lovely feeling to have two, it feels right for me. A lot of it is dictated by my age, but you can go through all the ifs and buts in the world, but I feel very lucky to have two and I’ll feel lucky if they are happy and healthy and I think I’ll have done very well if I get that.