I think with motherhood and child-rearing in general everyone's going to tell you how to do it and why. I've always said to other mothers and women when they've asked me that you have to find your own way and find out what works for your family at all costs.

With the counseling of my family doctor my mother ended up turning to Weight Watchers and their children's program. I went to weekly meetings got counseling and would exercise with my peers who were my size. It was the first time I saw a proper children's portion size and it wasn't two burgers it was one.

My father really was not the dominant person who raised the family it was my mother who raised the family.

My mother isolated herself from all family and friends for some 20 years. And never met her grandchild my son.

While I have felt lonely many times in my life the oddest feeling of all was after my mother Lucille died. My father had already died but I always had some attachment to our big family while she was alive. It seems strange to say now that I felt so lonely yet I did.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money because Africa was the 'dark continent' and because I was a girl.

It has to be real and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important and it has to be people who are present you know and mothers and fathers both are not present enough with children.

I'm considered homophobic and crazy about these things and old fashioned. But I think that the family - father mother children - is fundamental to our civilisation.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity my father who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility and my mother's father who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women - 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother according to census data - is practically absurd and morally indefensible.