Declan Donnelly has called parenting the “hardest thing” he’s ever done, after welcoming his first child five months ago.
The TV presenter, 43, who is dad to baby Isla with his wife Ali Astall, wasn’t prepared for the shock of becoming a dad.
“No one tells you how hard being a parent is,” he told the Evening Standard. “We could have had a warning! It is literally the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I’m loving it.”
Donnelly isn’t the first celebrity parent to speak out about the challenges of becoming a mum or dad – plenty of famous faces have discussed the struggles they’ve faced since starting a family.
“It’s fucking hard, I had no idea,” Adele told i-D back in 2015, after welcoming her son Angelo. “It is hard but it’s phenomenal. It used to be that my own world revolved around me, but now it has to revolve around him.”
Meanwhile, Fearne Cotton previously spoke about how becoming a mum for the first time felt like “carnage”, telling The Sun: “I can come up for air more often [now]. The first bit of motherhood is absolute carnage, but I feel like I’m able to now focus a little bit more on work, because I was so nervous before. I get a lot of guilt and find it very hard to know how to balance my time.”
And Tom Fletcher has spoken about “winging it”, telling Baby Magazine: “Fatherhood isn’t what you expect it to be. As much as I ‘prepared’, it’s still hard. You just have to wing it!”
As our HuffPost UK parenting reporter put it: “If we stopped sugarcoating the truth of parenting, maybe we’d all feel less alone.”