Steph McGovern keeps the identities of her girlfriend and her daughter to herself, but on 17 January, she shared a rare photo of her tot on social media. The Steph’s Packed Lunch star, 43, took to Instagram to tease the release of her debut book, Deadline.
Captioning her post, “A birth of sorts”, broadcaster Steph shared a carousel of photos timelining the events leading up to the announcement of her book, from her decision to leave her hosting position at BBC Breakfast in 2019 to standing in the factory holding the finished product.
Among the photos was a throwback photo of her daughter, who is now six years old, in a cute purple babygrow, sitting in a rocker positioned in front of the TV at her Yorkshire home, where Channel 4’s The Steph Show, as Steph’s Packed Lunch was called in 2020, was playing.
© InstagramSteph welcomes her first child
Steph welcomed her first child, whose name she has never revealed publicly, in November 2019, with her partner, who is a TV executive. While appearing on Giovanna Fletcher’s Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast in 2021, the TV star spoke candidly about her pregnancy and the couple’s decision to have a baby.
“Me and my partner got together, and we had been friends for a long time before we got together and so she knew all about this, that I was thinking about what to do,” she remembered.
© Getty“And then we got together and she was like, ‘Why don’t we just go for it?’ And we hadn’t even been together for that long and I was like, ‘Do you reckon?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, yeah. What’s stopping us?’ And so then we decided we would have a baby.”
Steph opens up about motherhood
Four years on, while speaking exclusively to HELLO! in October 2025, Steph revealed how she is handling motherhood now her daughter is at school.
© Instagram“I don’t know if I’ve nailed the parenting thing… we’re in the middle of that transition from reception to year one in school and it’s thrown up challenges that I didn’t know were going to be a thing,” she admitted. “It’s been a new phase of our communication…When you’re getting your kid ready for school in the morning and when you’ve also got to go and work yourself, you can’t be a perfect parent.”
When it comes to her daughter picking up skills, the journalist believes it’s imperative that she is a strong swimmer. She told us: “I am obsessed with my daughter being able to swim. I think it’s a life skill, it’s not even, just a hobby – this is a genuine life skill.
© Instagram“I always feel like a competitive mum on the side of the pool,” she jokes. “I don’t want her to be the fastest or anything, but it’s like: ‘Concentrate! This is really important to me.'”
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