TV star Jeff Brazier has opened up about his one ‘regret’ when raising his young children after watching hit Netflix series Adolescence.
The 45-year-old media personality raised his two sons as a single father – Bobby and Freddy – from the ages of four and five after his late wife, Jade Goody, died of cervical cancer in 2009, aged 27.
Although his children, now aged 20 and 21, are past the turbulent teenage years, the ITV presenter reflected on what he could have done differently while raising them.
He appeared alongside Craig Doyle, Jordan Banjo and Iain Stirling on a Loose Women special with an all-male panel to discuss the impact of Adolescence and the national conversation it has sparked.
When asked by Craig about his experience raising his two boys alone, he credited his mum and Aunty Leslie for their huge help.
He then explained: ‘In terms of doing it all alone I put all the pressure in the world on myself because I think the way that I coped with challenges that we faced in my childhood was to be positive and roll your sleeves up.
‘Naturally that became a coping strategy that I adopted when I was like “right I’ve got two children of my own and I need to somehow get through this. I need to cope”.’
He made his world ‘really small’ to just deal with what was ‘in front of him’.
The host continued: ‘I just used the shield of positivity which meant that I was batting off anything negative. I wasn’t really sitting on “how is this for you? How are you doing? Are you keeping a balance here?”.
‘That wasn’t in my mind whatsoever. It was just “are they alright? Do they have what they need? Are they being fed? Are they getting to school?”
‘So I regret that. I think that it is a really natural way to go about that so there’s no shame or embarrassment.’
But if he could go back and talk to his ‘younger self’ he would have said to be a ‘full menu’.
He would have said: ‘You need to be the full menu. For yourself as much as them. You need to be able to show the full range of emotions. The negative ones where you feel a bit despondent and feel like you can’t carry all of this pressure and weight.
‘You have to be able to voice that and share that with friends and let them see that as well because it would have been a really important.’
He said that he ‘wasn’t able to do that at the time’ and his coping strategy was ‘pre-determined’.
Jeff concluded: ‘But I’ve certainly done loads and loads of work on it since and I make sure I am as much of a full menu as I can possibly be.’
Later in the episode, he read out a letter to his younger self in which he discussed similar topics, getting emotional as he took a trip down memory lane.
And, as the conversation turned to the manosphere and Andrew Tate’s influence on young boys today, he admitted that he ‘can’t be the answer to everything.’
Since its release last month, Adolescence has broken a UK viewing record for Netflix and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has confirmed the four-part drama will be shown in schools.
In his column for Metro, Starmer said he was ‘delighted that Netflix is making the drama free for secondary schools across the country’.
He wrote: ‘This is a fantastic step to start the essential conversations we need to be having in classrooms across the nation.
‘Because almost every week, we hear shocking stories of violent crimes against women.’
Loose Women airs at 12:30pm on ITV on weekdays.
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