Nadiya Hussain’s six tips to make you a better parent

Nadiya Hussain's house sounds like a great place to be a kid.

You misbehave, you get strapped into a T-shirt with your sibling. You want everyone to know you're sad without having to say anything? No problem.

The 32-year-old Bake Off winner seems to have pretty much every parenting problem down pat, and is happy to keep learning more.

Here, she shares her tips and tricks to help make family life just a little bit easier...

1. Be a team

"The busier I get, the more thought I need to put into juggling work and home life. I'm really lucky, though, because when I'm not around, my husband Abdal - who works a full-time IT job - manages to drop the kids off, pick them up and reheat the food (he doesn't cook but he's very good at reheating). It's all about balancing.

"Somehow we manage and it doesn't feel like a struggle, but I think he's really good at making me feel like it's not a struggle. So when there are things I can't keep up with, he just does them.

'I learned that rather than trying to deal with it, it's better to hand them over and vent your anger without venting it on them'

"When my little girl Maryam turned one-and-a-half [she's now 6], she became a completely different person. I found the, 'No, I'm not going to listen to you' phase really difficult because the boys [Musa, now 10, and Dawud, 9] just got on with whatever it was that I told them to do. I really struggled. But I learned that rather than trying to deal with it, it's better to hand them over and vent your anger without venting it on them.

"I lived in Leeds then and there weren't really many people around. I remember having days where she'd be screaming and shouting and saying 'no' to everything, and as soon as my husband walked in, I'd literally hand her over and say, 'It's been one of those days'.

"Then she'd be good as gold for him. But what you can't do is wait for a miraculous change. They will ride the phase out. There's no point getting anxious."

2. Make time for your family - including your partner

"I try my very best not to be in work mode all the time. Some days I'm too busy, so they'll go off and do their own thing, but other days, I'll put everything off until the children go to bed. Then I realise I also have a husband and he needs attention, too, so some nights and some weekends, I'll give to him."

3. Teach little ones to clean up after themselves

"I cook with my little girl but the boys are really good in the kitchen, so they go off and do their own thing now. Maryam loves cooking and she's not a mess-maker. She tidies up as she goes along, but that's the rule in our house: If you make the mess, you have to tidy it up.

"They've now learned the consequence of being messy and it's made them really tidy, which is a godsend. Whereas my husband uses every pan, knife and board in the house for a spaghetti bolognese... "

4. Make your kids sort out their own arguments

"Whenever the kids have a squabble, we have a big T-shirt of their dad's and they have to wear it. So we stick them both in the T-shirt and they have to be as close together as is physically possible and have no choice about it. And then we just leave them.

"They end up giggling and and having a great time - I don't even have to intervene."

5. Create a sad corner

"We have a little corner by the stairs and when we moved, we had to recreate it. That's the corner where if you're sad, you go and sit there and somebody knows.

"We all get wrapped up in other things and we forget to ask, 'How are you? How was your day?' sometimes. I learned that from my husband. He said, 'Look, I'm not a mind reader, if you're upset, you've got to tell me you're upset.

"With kids, sometimes they don't want to talk about it, but they want you to know they're upset. And sometimes you don't. As a parent, I feel really bad when I don't know. So we have a step in the house where if they're feeling sad, they go and sit on it. Even I go and sit on that step if I'm upset about something. It works."

6. Switch off tech

"Switch everything off for family time. We have a box and all the phones go in there. We lock it up and the key goes away. So that includes my phone, the kids', everything goes away in this box.

"Even if it buzzes or rings, we don't touch it. We have a landline and if there's an emergency, somebody will ring that. Otherwise, it gets put away. And some nights we just have to do that, because we're all guilty of picking up our phones."