Parenting expert Maggie Dent leaves Kate Ritchie in tears in motherhood interview

A parenting expert reduced radio host Kate Ritchie to tears on air after calling out dads over a painful truth about motherhood.

Radio star Kate Ritchie was reduced to tears after hearing a painful home truth about motherhood.

Parenting expert Maggie Dent appeared on the Fitzy and Wippa with Kate Ritchie breakfast show where she called on Aussie dads to better understand the range of emotions mums go through on a daily basis.

She pointed to bedtime, when dads typically fall asleep while mums will over-analyse the day.

“Can I show the slight difference between mums and dads? Like, when you go to bed at night,” Ms Dent said.

“The singular focus of most males means ‘I’m going to go to bed to go to sleep’. But mums are biologically wired to make sure we’re caring really well, because of oestrogen.”

Dent said overthinking “is a female thing”, and asked Aussie dads to be aware of what their partners go through on a daily basis.

“(Before bed) we’ll go through every decision we made during the day from now to breakfast. Not only that, we’ll worry about ‘they didn’t eat enough broccoli, did I have enough of that in the lunchbox’,” she continued.

Speaking on Fitzy and Wippa this week, Maggie Dent said mums often found it hard to sleep with everyday life weighing on their minds.

Kate Ritchie was moved to tears by Dent's comments.

“It’s a female thing. We second guess ourselves and then beat ourselves up. Then suddenly we’ll be wondering if they’ll get into university and then we’ve gone back and regret something we did at our 21st birthday.

“Then we’ll come forward to the kids again, comparing to somebody else. Then we’ll go ‘oh my god, my eyebrows, I’ll need to book that in.”

By the end of her explanation, co-host Kate Ritchie was in tears, saying she had also experienced the “inner dialogue that doesn’t ever end”.

“This is the mum brain, this is the mental load we carry for the people we love,” Dent continued as Ritchie wiped her face.

“Sorry for doing that to you, Kate.

“So what I want sometimes is for our dads to recognise that we’re just wired different and we want dads to be able to jump in and go ‘I’ve got this, love’.”

Former Home and Away actress Kate has one daughter Mae, who is eight.