Autism and Our Family: Paddy and Christine McGuinness to release BBC documentary about raising autistic children

Couple have three children, all of whom have been diagnosed with autism

Christine and Paddy McGuinness in 2019 (Getty Images)

Paddy McGuinness and his wife Christine are working on a new BBC documentary about raising children with autism.

The TV presenter and model have three children together, twins Penelope and Leo, seven, and Felicity, four, all of whom have been diagnosed with autism.

Now, the couple will appear in a one-off documentary titled Autism and Our Family about their day-to-day lives.

As reported by The Sun, the film is set to air later this year and will see the McGuinnesses meet with other parents, paediatricians and child-development experts to answer some of the questions an autism diagnosis raises.

Appearing on a recent episode of the Lockdown Parenting Hell podcast, Paddy explained: “For me as parent who has children with additional needs, you feel, a little bit, that everyone else is having a really good time apart from me.

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“When I see other people in the same situation or people, in a weird and perverse way, worse off than you, you kind of feel, ‘Oh well, at least I’m not dealing with that’. Weirdly it makes you feel a little bit better or that I’m not on my own with this.”

The Take Me Out host said that he hoped filming the documentary would allow people to see that they shouldn’t be embarrassed about asking for help.

“[People think] ‘He’s on telly and got money... so he shouldn’t have those sorts of worries’, but I do.”