Gordon Ramsey has revealed that he's a ‘softie’ when he's at home with his six kids, with his wife even calling him ‘incredibly sensitive,’ as he spoke about the job he finds ‘hardest’ to do as a dad.
You may not have thought it with all the shouting and swearing we see him do on TV, but Gordon Ramsey's a big 'softie' really. That's according to him, anyway.
The celebrity chef, whose recipes we love, has opened up in an exclusive interview about his life away from the screen and at home with his children. The 56-year-old has just welcomed his sixth child with wife Tana, 49, with the baby boy becoming the younger sibling to Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Matilda, 21, and 4-year-old Oscar.
The brood is a large one and Gordon believes they are the people who bring out the 'most emotion' in him. He told PEOPLE Magazine, “The kids have brought the most emotion out of me. It’s funny, isn’t it? Because everyone thinks, ‘God, you must be an absolute ass to be at home with.’ [But] Tana’s super fierce, an ex-Montessori school teacher. So I’m the softie.”
Tana chimed in, adding to her husband's description of himself, "He is, believe it or not, incredibly sensitive—he’s a crier.”
Backing up her mum, daughter Holly added, “The day he walks me down the aisle, we are going to need so many tissues. My veil will have to be [made of] tissues so he can walk behind me and mop up his tears.”
His parenting rules may be incredibly strict, with one of them even forcing his children fly alone while he sits in first class, but the star's approach to parenthood has clearly worked, with all his kids being successful in their chosen fields. “Jack’s a Royal Marine commando, off defending the country in some of the most extreme conditions. Megan’s an incredible police officer. Holly’s gone into fashion. Tilly’s studying at university for her degree - Tana and I came from a family with no degrees!”
But while the kids are all doing well, they still rely on him for one important thing - and it's the thing he finds most difficult about being a dad. Finding solutions.
“My job as a dad is to come up with a solution to their problems," he said. "That’s the most important role of a dad. But boy, that’s hard with five kids, five problems, 25 a week, a hundred a month—that’s a lot of solution fixing.”
But he manages it even in between travelling to all the stunning filming locations for his BBC show Future Food Stars. Most of that determination to be the best dad he can be comes from the lack of a father figure that he had for himself in childhood. Ramsey shared, "Growing up, I never had a father figure. Everything I was witnessing at the time was from an alcoholic father, so I knew I had to take the opposites.
"I had to bounce back from adversity. I had to live in a one-room dwelling with my big sister and then go and educate myself. Watching your parents struggle massively, you learn to dance in the rain, you learn to get through the storm. That’s what started to shape my DNA—standing strong in the eye of the storm.”
