A child’s tantrum can be hard to manage at the best of times.
So spare a thought for Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, who maintained her composure for 22 hours during rolling news coverage of the 2010 election – only to be confronted with a screaming five-year-old when she returned home.
She admits she took drastic measures to calm eldest son Milo – locking him in the garden.
“I opened the back door and picked him up and said, ‘Right, you are in the garden until you stop crying’. I shut the door.
Then I realised he didn’t have any shoes on, so I opened the door, threw the shoes out and shut it again.
“I thought, ‘Actually, I’ve been awake for 22 hours, I can’t listen to this’. I knew he was not going to come to any trouble because it’s a safe garden but I just couldn’t listen to the screaming.
"I like to terrify them for brief moments and then calm down.”
Now, when Emily, 48, returns home from a shift, she has a failsafe way to unwind. “I have a chat with the dog.
"After work I am buzzing. I pour myself a little vodka or a glass of rose and the dog has a treat and I recount my day.”
Her children – Milo, now 15, and Max, 12 – “show no mercy” while criticising her TV appearances.
Emily, talking to Good Housekeeping, says: “Every mistake I make will not go unnoticed by my children.
"All the trouble I get into they think is great.” Read the full interview in the October issue of Good Housekeeping, which is on sale now.
