Beloved TV presenter and proud mum Davina McCall – renowned for her fitness empire, for hosting huge shows like Big Brother and The Masked Singer, and her popular Begin Again podcast – believes the most profound lesson in parenthood isn’t about what you pass on to your children, but what they ultimately teach you.
“If ever somebody’s saying to me, I don’t know whether to have kids or not, one of the reasons why I would say have kids is not because of what you can pass on, it’s what they make you look at,” says the 57-year-old mum to Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Chester, 18. “Tilly, my middle one, has been the greatest at teaching me to stop micromanaging. She is like, ‘no Mum, let me try this – don’t tell me what to do. I know what to do, and if it’s a mistake, I’ll still be OK’.
“I think that’s the big fear with parents, you think, oh my God, I’ve got to lead you through this one. It’s going to be difficult, but they have to make mistakes. When I look at my life, the greatest gift that I’ve been given have been all my catastrophes. I’ve learned most from the catastrophes and if you don’t let your kids have catastrophes, how are they going to learn?”
Another important lesson the mother-of-three has adopted over the years is what she calls “radical honesty”.
“I think the other really big thing with kids is being honest,” says McCall. “The more honest you are with your kids, the more honest they can be back with you. Then you forgive them for whatever it is they’ve broken, or they’ll forgive you… and they will learn how good it feels to forgive someone. We all mess up. We are all fallible in some way.”
Like everything, McCall acknowledges that parenthood has its highs and lows.
“The hardest things about motherhood is guilt,” reflects the TV presenter. “I used to feel really bad if I couldn’t make things like sports day or speech day. I would try to, and book out these days roughly six months in advance – which is how long people book shows for – but you can’t always do that, and sometimes you have to juggle.
“But the joy is someone cupping your face in their hands and looking at you like they love you more than anything… or coming to you if they’re sad or something scared them and they want you, oh my God, it’s like the greatest feeling in the world.”
The podcast host calls her younger self “unembarassingly ambitious”, but reflects how holding her first baby, Holly, for the first time in 2001 shifted her perspective on everything.
“I was unembarrassingly ambitious in my career and in my life before I had Holly,” shares McCall. “People often use the word ambitious like a dirty word, ‘Oh, she’s so ambitious, ew’, but I want to do well and I’m not embarrassed about that.
“I remember getting pregnant and thinking I’ll do four months off and then I’ll get back to work and everything will be back to normal. But, then I remember looking at Holly and thinking, oh s***, I never want to work again. I just want to sit here all day, every day, for the rest of my life and stare at you. You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
“I never thought that I would feel as maternal as I did. I always thought that I would easily be able to kind of mix those feelings of ambition and motherhood, but actually, my ambition just disappeared overnight.”
Exchanging personal experiences about birth over the years with other women in her life is what inspired her to write a new self-help guide book Birthing, following her No 1 Sunday Times bestseller Menopausing, which was published in 2022.
From navigating the highs and lows of fertility to the physical and emotional challenges of birth and recovery, the book includes advice from Davina herself and a team of experts who help answer the questions women often feel too afraid to ask.
“I’ve met so many different women through my life, and I’m always saying to them, how was your birth? Some of them were traumatised, either by the speed of it or by a person, or by an experience or an emergency,” says McCall. “A bit like the menopause, everybody’s experience of birth is different. So, after I’d done the Menopausing book, they were like what’s your next book going to be? I was like, yes, this is my opportunity to do Birthing!
“It was really nice coming at it from the same angle as Menopausing. We wanted to get everybody’s experience into it. We wanted to get partners’ experiences, we wanted to get women’s experiences of all types of birth, when it goes wrong, when it goes right, when something really awful happens, what do you do? Where do you go? How do you cope? To hear it first-hand from them is extremely powerful.”
She hopes this new book will help dispel the taboos, demystify the many uncertainties surrounding childbirth and will, most importantly, empower women to make their own decisions.
“I want people to get all the information so that they can make an informed decision that’s empowering,” says McCall. “The worst feeling in the world is shame and the feeling like you’ve done it wrong and you somehow feel like a failure. No one is a failure, ever.
“You often have very little control over the kind of birth that you have, but there are certain things that you have got control over and I want to empower you with those things.”
Birthing by Davina McCall is published in hardback by HQ, Harper Collins, priced £22. Available September 11.
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