To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a webbrowser that supports HTML5video Lily Allen shared the two key reasons behind her decision to have children in her mid-20s in a candid conversation. The Smile hitmaker, 39, discussed the topic of having children – and then pressure women are under to start a family by the age of 40 – with her best friend Miquita Oliver in a recent episode of her BBC podcast Miss Me? Lily shares two daughters with her ex-husband, Sam Cooper – Marnie, 12, and Ethel, 11. ‘I think I had children for all the wrong reasons really because I was yearning for unconditional love, which I haven’t felt in my life since I was a child,’ she told Miquita.
She added: ‘Also my career was at such a high speed, you know high pressure and I’m a people pleaser and I felt like very overwhelmed by what was happening. ‘I just didn’t get much respite and I felt like the one way to stop people hassling me, it’s not about me it’s about this other person that’s inside me.’ When asked if it did slow things down, she confirmed that it had the desired effect.
‘They did leave me alone, but I don’t think I really understood what I got myself into,’ she said . Between 2011 to 2013 (when Lily had her two kids) she had already celebrated two chart-topping tunes, – Smile and The Fear – and was working towards another number-one album, Sheezus, which came out in 2014 and featured her beloved Somewhere Only We Know cov.