Nicola Bulley's partner has comforted their traumatised children by telling them 'the very best people in the world are looking for mummy'.
The parent hadn't ever spent more than two nights away from her daughters before she vanished last month.
In an interview with Channel 5's Dan Walker, Paul Ansell has revealed how he is trying to keep hid kids' spirits high.
"It is impossible," he said on the programme tonight. "As any parent knows, all you want to do this is make everything better for your children, isn’t it?
"Whenever they’re worried or they are scared or anything like that you just you want to make it better for them and I can't.
"I can't do that. So all I can do is be as strong as I can so that they don't see the level of like worry on my face and reassure them as much as I can with what we know which isn’t much and then try and distract them so that their minds aren’t focused on it.
"I find that that’s the best way of doing it so reassure them as much as I can, to distract them."
He added: "The only thing that I can do is tell them that everybody is looking for mummy.
"The best people like in the world are looking for mummy, just to give them that you know that that level of hope that they can understand that everything that can be done is being done.
"I just have to hope that that is enough for them, to sort of put them at rest at that particular moment before the questions come again.
"There isn't really anything else I can say because I don't know anything else."
He says his two daughters have seen the 'missing' posters dotted around the area.
"They’re obviously seeing the posters around," he added. "At first I tried to like shelter them from that but obviously you can’t.
"I was trying to keep things as normal as I can for them but it’s everywhere. So they've obviously seen all that now. But they've looked at it in a positive way."
The search has been underway since Nicola, known as Nikki, to her friends disappeared while walking her dog near the river in St Michael's on Wyre in Lancashire, on Friday, January 27.
Lancashire Police launched a massive search and were seen combing the river bank, utilising diving teams, search dogs, drones and boats to no avail.
He refuses to point fingers at the police, despite no news two weeks on.
The force are this afternoon trawling underneath a bridge more than seven miles from where the mortgage adviser was last seen.
“I have to categorically say I cannot fault the police in any of this, they have been incredible, and the relationship that we have working on this is still very, very strong, it’s very good," he added.
"So this isn’t any criticism of them at all, I just want to make that clear.”
The bridge is about halfway to the estuary from the village.
Images show specialists in a small boat travelling around and under the road crossing.
It comes as the search has already expanded to the Irish Sea.
Police have said their "main working hypothesis" was that she fell in a river but a body has not yet been found. However, they insist they are keeping an open mind.
