Nanny knows best
No one over 40 should have a baby
If it weren’t for the fact that Kathryn Mewes is a Norland trained nanny with a TV show dedicated to taming unruly children, her two-year-old’s bedtime routine would seem perfectly normal. Little Harriet expects to be read two stories, after which she will snuggle under the covers, cough wistfully, and ask her mother to fetch her a beaker of water. Then she’ll demand lullabies, cuddles, more water – and before long, half an hour has passed, and Mewes is so wound up that she yells, “Enough, Harriet! That is it!” and closes the door firmly on her daughter.
“What a rubbish way to put your child to bed,” she sighs. “You give them everything and then you give them nothing. As I rush around after her, I’m almost slapping myself on the wrist. I wouldn’t let a client do it.”
Over the past two years, Mewes has morphed from modern-day Mary Poppins, famed for wearing down the most obnoxious of children, to a 45-year-old mother-of-two-under-three with a propensity to blub.
“I don’t think anyone over 40 should have children,” she says firmly. “What your body goes through is traumatic enough in your 20s. If your body is closer to menopause than puberty, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.”
But she looks so good on it, I point out. In her skinny jeans and ruffled white shirt, today she is every bit the chic London mum – a far cry from the tweed-wearing battleaxe who tore parents to shreds on the first series of The Three Day Nanny. Isn’t there a small part of her that feels proud for having it all?
“If I’d fallen in love earlier, my career would never have come before kids,” she insists. “If anyone tells me they are putting off kids until they have a promotion at work or buy a bigger house I say ‘just have the kids’. You will kick yourself if you leave it too late.”
Physically and mentally, she struggled with her health after giving birth to Harriet, and required two operations following a caesarean section with her second child, Olivia. It pains her that her children have such elderly grandparents (her parents are in their 80s), and that she won’t see as much of their lives as she’d like to. “I’ll be going through menopause before they go through puberty – I’ll be lucky to have a husband afterwards,” she jokes.
We’re sitting in the spotless living room of her newly Farrow & Balled home in south-west London’s Nappy Valley and Harriet is clambering like a monkey over the cream sofa. “I wouldn’t dream of letting someone else’s child do this,” Mewes winces, as Harriet leans over a side table and attempts to post paper into a precious china egg. “But with Harriet, I think: ‘in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a sofa’.”
On her show – the third series started this week – she chides parents to be tougher on their kids. Does it worry her that at home her daughters are running rings around her? “As a professional, I know exactly how things should be done, but as a mum I try my best and fail,” she groans. “I give my children baked beans and fish fingers and I beat myself up for it.”
She never expected motherhood to be easy, but two children within 20 months of each other nearly sent her over the edge, she says. If it wasn’t for Grace, her 19-year-old nanny, she’d be in a “loony bin”. “It’s an impossible job to do on your own,” she declares. “I don’t believe there is a mother out there who can say they don’t have one ounce of help and everything is wonderful in their life: they’re fulfilled; their house is immaculate; they never snap at their kids. Before launching her TV career she worked as a nanny for high profile families for 20 years – and never longed for her own children. “If I’d fixated on having my own children I’d have ended up on antidepressants,” she says. “I hadn’t met the right man and I was only getting older.”
When in her late 30s, she met Liam, a chartered surveyor. She knew instantly that she wanted him to be the father of her children. If only she could get pregnant. After two miscarriages, and by now aged 41, she eventually did, and Harriet was born a healthy 8lb 5oz. Doctors warned her there would be no more babies; it was only when she began feeling sick on Harriet’s first birthday that she discovered she was 14 weeks along.
Liam, terrified that his wife wouldn’t cope, offered to keep Grace on full-time and send Bertie the dog to kennels. “Looking back, there was definitely an element of postnatal depression after Harriet,” she explains. “I hit rock bottom. But I didn’t second time around – I had a support network in place and, other than my own physical recovery, having Olivia was a joy.”
I first met Mewes in 2015, as a draconian but extremely effective nanny helping me discipline my own two sons (“I refuse to let someone half my size make my stress levels rise” she quipped at the time) and then again six weeks after Harriet was born, a sobbing wreck, who had called in an army of maternity nurses and breastfeeding experts. Motherhood, she told me then, had emotionally damaged her.
The attachment-parenting brigade will despair, but Mewes is convinced that mothers need to go against their own natural instincts in order to be good parents. This is why professionals like her achieve such good results – they can see clearly what is going on. “The times I fail as a mother are when I follow my instinct – there’s a part of me that
‘As a professional I know how things should be, but as a mum I try and fail’
questions whether ‘instinct’ is in fact just giving in.”
Her role as a consultant – she works two days a week and travels to China once a month for “silly money” – is to give parents confidence to be firm. But she admits that, these days, she finds it difficult to be as brutal with clients; her clarity of vision is blurred. “There’s no getting away from the fact my skill has been damaged,” she says.
Time to hang up her boots? She shakes her head. “My clients aren’t interested in me as a mum, they hire me as a professional to fix a problem – you wouldn’t expect your doctor to start telling you about their rash.”
In the new series, she tackles fighting, biting and tantrums with her usual steeliness, but also urges parents not to be so hard on themselves. “It doesn’t matter if your son’s watched some telly, if it meant you sent that important email,” she says, though she still finds herself getting overwhelmed at home.
At teatime last Sunday, Mewes felt the all too familiar sensation of tears prickling her eyes. “Olivia was feeding her food to the dog, Harriet was struggling to get down from the table before she’d finished and Liam was attempting to have an adult conversation with me,” she says. “And I looked at them all and just felt so lucky.”
The Three Day Nanny is broadcast on Thursdays at 8pm on More 4. bespokenanny.com