I keep tabs on my girls with an app says Jamie
HE previously revealed that worries about social media had made him ban his children from posting selfies.
Now Jamie Oliver has admitted he uses a ‘spy app’ to monitor the location of his teenage daughters.
The popular television chef – father of Poppy, 16, Daisy 15, Petal, nine, Buddy, eight, and two-year-old River – said the smartphone application enables him and his wife Jools to see exactly where their children are and the route they are taking.
‘We use an app to keep track of our kids’ whereabouts,’ Oliver said in an interview with Woman magazine.
‘The older girls, Jools and I are all on an app called Life360, which means we can see exactly where everybody is and the route they’ve gone.’
Explaining the benefits, he added: ‘So if one of the girls says, “I’m going to Camden Town” and I can see they’ve gone to Reading, then we have a problem. They can check on me, too, and see how fast I’m driving. It’s brilliant.’
The free app allows users to track family members’ movements and sends automatic notifications when people come and go from home, work and school, and when they complete trips.
Oliver and his wife, both 43, have been married for 18 years and the chef told the magazine his love for her had grown in that time.
‘I like watching Jools get older,’ he said. ‘I love her more now than I ever have before. I’m enjoying her evolving as a woman, growing older. There has been a lot of chaos in the past 20 years, but she keeps the home very normal and stable, and that’s lovely.
‘We’re yin and yang – she’s very homey and family based and I grew up in a pub, I love meeting people and that is not her idea of fun. She gets a lot more stressed than me and I calm her down. But we come together over parenting; our approaches are very similar.’
Oliver, who works long hours running his £240million cooking empire, said it did not feel weird to leave most of the parenting to Jools during the week. ‘I don’t think being a weekend dad is weird,’ he said.
‘Actually, I think I’m a full-time dad, it’s just that I’m physically active with the kids at the weekends and the holidays.
‘Probably 95 per cent of Britain is the same – I don’t know how many dads or working parents are home for dinner five days a week.
‘In my company we have flexible hours for staff and we’re very conscious of parents’ needs, but because I’m the boss I’ve got a few more things to do.
‘I go in early and finish late most days. Sometimes, the kids drop in. My daughter Poppy came into the office to open her GCSE results – I’d never seen her smile like that.’
Last year Oliver revealed he had banned daughter Daisy from posting selfies and compared the trend to pornography.
He told The Lifestyle News Hound podcast: ‘We’re the first generation of parents to deal with this [social media].
‘At 13 to 14 the kind of pictures girls are putting up, from what I have seen, are split 50/50 – a normal young girl and then this weird hybrid of quite porno, luscious, pouty lips, pushing boobs out.
‘I’m like, “My God!” I don’t even want to look at some of the things my daughter shows me. I’m like, “Really? Aren’t their parents all over that like a rash?”’