Kirstie Allsopp urges young women to put off university and have children younger: ‘Fertility is the one thing we can’t change’

Kirstie Allsopp is encouraging women to put back going to university in favour of settling down and having children in their mid-twenties because “fertility falls off a cliff when you’re 35”.

The Location, Location, Location presenter, 42, labelled herself a "passionate feminist" and said she felt society has "not been honest enough with women" about the issue.

"Some of the greatest pain that I have seen among friends is the struggle to have a children," the mother-of-two told the Daily Telegraph.

"It wasn’t all people who couldn’t start early enough because they hadn’t met the right person.

"Women are being let down by the system. We should speak honestly and frankly about fertility and the fact it falls off a cliff when you’re 35.

"We should talk openly about university and whether going when you’re young, when we live so much longer, is really the way forward.

"At the moment, women have 15 years to go to university, get their career on track, try and buy a home and have a baby. That is a hell of a lot to ask someone."

The presenter has two sons – one aged five and another aged seven – with property developer Ben Anderson.

She continued: "I don’t have a girl, but if I did I’d be saying ‘Darling, do you know what? Don’t go to university.

Start work straight after school, stay at home, save up your deposit – I’ll help you, let’s get you into a flat.

"'And then we can find you a nice boyfriend and you can have a baby by the time you’re 27.'"

"I don’t want the next generation of women to go through the heartache that my generation has," she added.

"At the moment we are changing the natural order of things, with grandparents being much older and everyone squeezed in the middle.

"Don’t think ‘my youth should be longer’. Don’t go to university because it’s an ‘experience’. No, it’s where you’re supposed to learn something! Do it when you’re 50!

"[It] might sound wholly unrealistic. But we have all this time at the end. You can do your career afterwards.

"We have to readjust. And men can have fun after they have kids. If everyone started having children when they were 20, they’d be free as a bird by the time they were 45."

The TV personality previously came under fire for claiming that working mothers enjoyed doing household chores because they find them "therapeutic".

"I’m not doing the ironing because I have to, but if I get a chance, I find it immensely therapeutic," she told Western Daily Press in January.

"I’m absolutely convinced that those repetitive tasks that one does every day, organising and regularising one’s home, and keeping it tidy, [are] enormously therapeutic.

"I know it is for me, and I have many, many working mum friends who feel the same."