Raising the next generation certainly has its perks – but there’s also a long list of challenges that come with it.
For mum-of-two Allison Langdon, hosting Parental Guidance has helped make her the best mother she can be, but also one who is quite different from who she was before she started presenting the Channel Nine series, which returns for its third season.
Once again, she and her co-host, expert Dr Justin Coulson, are joined by different sets of parents from across Australia to discuss the issues they Allison, 46, told us that her time on the show has helped mould the way she brings up son Mack, eight, and daughter Scout, six – her children with husband Michael Willesee Jr., 55.
She says the discussions from the show, and meeting the range of mums and dads with different parenting styles, got her and Mike thinking about how they wanted to parent.
“What the show did, particularly in the first season, was make a lot of people think, ‘I’ve never really thought about my parenting style,’” Ally told New Idea.
“I haven’t fundamentally changed the parenting, but I’ve taken something out of every season … Some parenting styles, I probably didn’t expect to connect or relate to.”
Ally believes the show’s appeal lies in that most viewers who have children can relate to at least one set of the parents.
“I feel like most of us sit there and go, I’m a little bit like that, I’m a little bit that, gosh, I wish I was like them, but by the end of this season, you know what, I’m gonna go home and that’s how I’m going to parent!” she exclaimed.
This year’s season of Parental Guidance is being billed as a special event series. It focuses on four key pillars: screen time, peer pressure, body image and mental health.
“Once you have a conversation, like smacking which we had in Season 1, you can’t really have it again,” Ally said.
“And so going into a third season, it had to be different. We just looked at all the issues that parents are going through at the moment.”
She takes in all the topics of conversation, and applies them to her own life and experiences.
The topic of consent pops up this season and really stuck out to her as “an eye-opener”.
“The conversation around consent bothered me,” she admitted.
“Luckily we had an expert in the room with us and just sort of listened to where the room went in certain aspects. There were lots of different opinions on it.”
For Allison, the show has reiterated that “the most important thing is family time”.
“You learn very early on watching this show that kids don’t need fancy holidays or gifts or being taken to an arcade. It’s as simple as they just want your time and attention and that’s [when] our house is most settled,” she says.
“When the kids do play up you can always bring it back to the fact that we’re not as present as we would like to be.”
