Genevieve Roberts explores the hot topics and parenting issues she encounters while raising her three children in her weekly column, Outnumbered
Comedian Russell Kane has achieved the parenting Holy Grail: balance. A guaranteed good night’s sleep, sex four or five times a week, a satisfying fitness programme – and lots of time at home with his family.
A lot of this comes down to the way Kane, 49, and his wife Lindsey Cole, a former make-up artist, 37, planned babyhood before conceiving Mina, their daughter, now nine.
“Lindsey and I promised each other solemnly two things: we’d work together to encourage our child gently to have a routine and sleep through the night, and we’d have a weekend away together where we’d leave the child with one of the Nanas before it was three months old. We booked that holiday before Lindsey gave birth. And we hated it. We cried. We missed our baby, and it was a bit of a disaster, but we did it,” he remembers.
The sleep schedule was more of a success. He couldn’t perform stand-up with interrupted sleep and they followed Gina Ford’s structured routines. By the time Mina was eight weeks old, she was sleeping eight hours a night in her own room.
I tell him that we haven’t conquered sleep as convincingly. My husband Mark is working away and I woke with three children in bed.
Kane asks: “Is that going to continue when your husband comes back? Is he going to end up in the spare room while you’re in the bed with the babies? How is that sustainable for a marriage?”
“Sorry, I should never judge,” he adds. “I always say: whatever anyone is doing as long as everyone’s happy. It’s what works for each family.”
Divorce rates among new parents are sky high with one in five marriages breaking down in the first year of a baby’s life. Kane believes that where it goes wrong is when there’s no communication on parenting beforehand – his “number one relationship hack” is to have these discussions before giving birth – otherwise the man ends up living “like an outcast in the spare room, building up resentment because he feels second place to the children.”
“Men want their wives back,” he says. “Men love sex. We love our wives. We love our children too, but we want both. We don’t want to be eating a Pot Noodle and masturbating in the spare room. Children shouldn’t be more important than your partner, they’re equal.”
He married Cole a decade ago, and says they cannot get enough of each other. “We fancy the pants off each other; we’re shagging every spare moment – it’s been like that since we met. We tone it down around our friends and don’t really talk about it because it breeds resentment,” he says.
It’s so rare to hear a parent talk about their excellent sex life that I’m curious what ‘every spare moment’ means? “We’re ‘physical’ four or five times a week when I’m around.”
And while they squabble – “normally around childcare, or me being grumpy because I’m tired” – he says they very rarely argue. I tell him his relationship sounds like the opposite of one where partners air grudges. “If you’re saying negative things about your partner, there is a deep, toxic issue at the core of your relationship, and if you do not fix it, you will split at one point, or someone will have an affair – that is guaranteed,” he believes.
Kane’s Hyperactive tour runs until December 2025 and he says he has the most energy on stage. “I stay extremely fit. A lot of the time when people say burnout and exhaustion, they’re not taking care of themselves physically. They’re not nourishing their body,” he says. Kane and Cole launched supplement brand Jolt together, which Kane takes alongside training. “I live life like a boxer.” He balances it with “dancing his tits off” on Ibiza holidays.
He’s enthusiastic about his recent bestselling children’s book Pet Selector and proud of his most recent Radio Four series of Evil Genius – and is hoping another television series of the same title, examining whether anyone from David Bowie to Winston Churchill is hero or villain, will be commissioned.
Even with his tour, he rarely spends long amounts of time away. “Two weeks ago, it was five nights, but that’s maybe once or twice a year. I come home, I’m on school runs, I break my back to be there,” he says. He turns down lots of potential work.
“I’m a bit more Holly Willoughby: I say no a lot. I’m not motivated by money or fame, I’m motivated by having a wicked life. I’ve got my theatres full, so I’m able to say no. For example, Strictly. I love dancing. But 12 weeks away with some random Venezuelan woman’s vulva on my thigh while all the newspapers make jibes? I don’t need that complication in my life. Neither does Lindsey.”
His planning skills might be better than the average parent, but Kane didn’t anticipate how much Mina would rely on him beyond the baby years. “I wasn’t prepared that children need you more as they get to seven or eight,” he says. “I’m the one that can calmly teach maths, not Lindsey. You learn over 15 years how to communicate quickly, so when a baby comes along, you naturally go, well, here’s a new language.”
The Kane household has regular family meetings, and Mina is active in decisions about her future with consequences spelt out (Kane swears by the book Positive Discipline by Jane Nelson), so, for example, she chose to study extra maths to try for a grammar school place, but was also given the choice of less study, more iPad and the likelihood of a different school.
While Cole does most of the school runs, in their first days as parents it was Kane who was researching everything from breast pumps to nappies. “That’s what came over me as an instinct: organisation and logistics,” he says.
He gave Mina skin-to-skin after she was born. “When Lindsey was cut open they said: ‘Would you like to hold your baby? And she was like: ‘Well, not really. Do you mind sticking my kidneys and all that gut shit back in and giving me half an hour? The baby was handed to me like it was some massive feminist moment,” he remembers. “But this should not be a big deal. The least a bloke could do is give the first cuddle. My top was off, chest-to-chest, she was warm. Fake tan transferred from my chest to my baby’s face. I thought she had jaundice.”
Lindsey remained in theatre for another hour, and Mina had her first breastfeed 60 minutes later. “Lindsey had sort of post-birth numbness, like, ‘what the f**k is happening to me?’ It took us a few months for the dust to settle and the bonding to kick in. I wouldn’t say I had that kind of heart-ripped-out-of-the-chest-want-to-be-with-my-baby-24/7 until Mina was about 18 months. That’s quite common, more than people let on,” he says.
With so many parents concerned that their first instinct towards their baby isn’t overwhelming love, Kane’s honesty about falling in love with his daughter slowly is both brave and important. Along with the enviable balance he’s found in life, now his only frustration is that he finds it hard to say no to his daughter. “I don’t know what it is, we just get on, I’m in love.”
For information on Russell’s Hyperactive tour visit www.russellkane.co.uk
Pet Selector! by Russell Kane. £14.99. Fully illustrated by Erica Salcedo.
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