She grew up as a mixed race child with a stammer in an all-white family. ROCHELLE HUMES tells SARAH RAINEY how struggles that used to embarrass her made her stronger

Out of nowhere, when she was five years old, Rochelle Humes developed a stammer.

She woke up one morning and the words just wouldn’t come out.

‘Weirdly, I had the chicken pox and something in the virus affected my speech,’ she says.

‘My mum didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. But it hugely affected my confidence – I became that child hiding behind my mum’s leg.

‘I needed safety blankets with everything. Socially, I struggled. I had the same best friend at school and I wasn’t confident outside of that.

‘The more nervous I got, the more it increased.’

Former pop star and TV host Rochelle Humes, 35, is the embodiment of sunny self-confidence -  despite her struggles with a stammer as a five-year-old

Growing up in East London without her father, Rochelle remembers how her vocal issues 'hugely affected my confidence' and that she 'became that child hiding behind my mum's leg'

But you wouldn’t know it today. Rochelle, now 35, positively beams sunny self-confidence – a disposition that has seen her transition from pop star with girl group The Saturdays to presenter, becoming a familiar face to millions as a regular stand-in host on ITV’s This Morning.

In fact, she explains, it was her mum’s desperate bid to help her shake her speech impediment that fuelled her love of being in the spotlight – so, in a roundabout way, she has that stammer to thank for where she’s ended up today.

‘I had speech therapy for quite a while,’ says Rochelle, ‘and then my mum sent me to performing arts school on weekends.

‘It really helped me socially. I felt confident. I found my thing that I loved and was really excited about. From then on, I got the bug.’

Helping young people feel confident in themselves and encouraging them to open up is especially important to Rochelle.

And not only as a parent – together with boyband star Marvin Humes, her husband of 12 years, she has three children: Alaia-Mai, ten, Valentina, seven, and Blake, three – but as the partnership ambassador for Marks & Spencer x YoungMinds, an initiative between the supermarket and the UK’s leading charity for young people’s mental health.

Pictured with fellow pop star and DJ husband Marvin Humes, 39, the couple have had three children: Alaia-Mai, ten, Valentina, seven (both pictured), and Blake, three

The need to get stars like Rochelle, whose 2.3 million social media followers comprise a huge young fanbase, on board with this issue has never been greater.

Stark new figures show that 3.5 million children and young people in the UK have a possible mental health disorder.

Experts have highlighted a ‘devastating explosion’ of untreated mental health issues among under-18s, urging the Government to ‘wake up’ to the worsening crisis.

‘I didn’t know about mental health or anxiety when I was a child,’ admits Rochelle. ‘I thought an illness was something you could see, like a broken leg.

‘We have come such a long way since then. We’ve learned how important it is to have that conversation with friends and ask if someone is doing OK – and there is no exception when it comes to our children.

‘They may be young and it’s easy to think “what have they got to be stressed about?”, but we really need to check-in with how they’re feeling.’

It’s something close to Rochelle’s heart. At 12, she was catapulted into the spotlight, performing as one-eighth of S Club Juniors – the all-singing-all-dancing spin-off act from pop group S Club 7.

The band, whose members ranged in age from ten to 13, were chosen from thousands of hopefuls through rigorous auditions on a 2001 TV series, and released a series of wholesome, catchy pop hits before disbanding in 2004.

Asked in a music interview in 2003 whether she was ‘completely happy all the time’, a smiling 14-year-old Rochelle simply replied: ‘Yes.’

Perhaps surprisingly, she stands by that today. ‘You hear stories of child stars being exploited and awful things, but my experience wasn’t that at all. I look back at it fondly. I had a great time and I felt very lucky.’

Being famous was – and still is – a dream-come-true for the schoolgirl who was raised by her mother Roz, a retired paramedic, in a council house in Barking, East London, after her father left when she was a baby.

‘We’ve always been incredibly close,’ says Rochelle, who also has a half-sister, Emily, who has a different father.

‘I’m not sure if it was because she was raising us on her own that we gained that different level of closeness and respect.

‘My mum and I are besties. I talk to her a billion times a day and tell her everything – probably more than she’d like me to. She’s my sounding board for most things in life.’

It was, she says, an upbringing that was ‘happy, busy and full of love’, but not without its complexities.

Raised by her white mother, mixed-raced Rochelle struggled to connect with her roots; it wasn’t until she was 15 that her Jamaican-born father, Mark Piper, made contact after years of silence.

‘We spent some time together but it didn’t go well,’ she has explained previously. ‘I was young, it was difficult.’

She has since built a relationship with her three grown-up half-siblings, Sophie, Lili and Jake, describing them as ‘one big blended family’.

But she still doesn’t speak to her father, although she insists she has forgiven him, and he doesn’t know his grandchildren: ‘He hasn’t ever reached out to me and I haven’t reached out to him.’

Rochelle and Marvin married in 2012 at Blenheim Palace. The pictured together at the Pride of Britain Awards in 2022

Instead, at her wedding in July 2012, at the picturesque Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, it was former England footballer Paul Ince, a family friend whom she calls ‘uncle’, who walked her down the aisle – and whom she says was very influential in her childhood.

When she was younger, Rochelle felt ‘embarrassed’ about being a mixed-race child in an all-white family.

‘Me and my sister looked completely different – she is white and I am half-black,’ she has said in the past. ‘I used to feel I had to explain everything: “This is my sister. I know we don’t look alike.”

‘I’d come with this whole disclaimer defending what people saw because I was worried people would think: “Oh, what’s going on there then?”’

As a pupil at Ardleigh Green Junior School in Hornchurch, she was tipped for success at an early age, doing catalogue modelling, TV commercials and appearing in a music video for the band Crowded House.

On weekends, she attended a performing arts school in Romford, Essex, which led to her West End debut – in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down The Wind – aged just ten.

Interviewed by the local newspaper at the time, somewhat prophetically she said: ‘I would like to be an actress, a dancer or a singer when I’m older. Or a TV presenter.’

When she joined S Club Juniors two years later, she says, it started off as ‘a weekend thing, a hobby’.

As the band got more successful, she left school, being homeschooled by day and performing by night.

‘We were young so we could only work so many hours,’ she says. ‘We were really well-protected: we had teams and chaperones everywhere, and our parents were very involved.

‘It wasn’t until I got into The Saturdays [the five-piece girlband she joined in 2007] that I realised I had a warped idea of how long our working hours would be.’

When S Club Juniors (by then called S Club 8) split up, Rochelle went back to school and normal life, handing out leaflets for a local radio station and working part-time at a restaurant to earn money.

‘It was a good year or two, but it was odd – people would recognise me. My mum was the one who made me do it. She said: “You’ve got to work. This is life.” And it was actually the best thing she could have done.’

Fame soon beckoned her back – first with The Saturdays (through which she met Marvin, now 39, a fellow pop star in the band JLS), then TV work, with both Rochelle and Marvin joining the This Morning team as stand-in presenters in 2013.

At the time they were tipped as ‘the next Richard and Judy’, but Marvin sidestepped to focus on DJing and music shows – leaving Rochelle as an occasional guest host, sitting on that familiar sofa alongside Phillip Schofield, Andi Peters and Craig Doyle.

She was, for a time, a favourite to replace Holly Willoughby after her shock departure last October, but is instead focusing on the many other spinning plates in her life: her baby skincare brand My Little Coco, matcha tea brand Cloudcha, other TV projects and The RH Group – a talent management agency she runs with her husband.

She’s already written three bestselling children’s books, amassed a reported £9 million fortune and, to top it off, is currently designing her ‘forever home’ after selling the family’s £3.3 million mansion in North London.

‘I have this fire in me that I’ve always had,’ she says with a grin. ‘Sometimes I wish I could turn it off.

‘I really love working. I know you’re supposed to say “I adore being a parent” and I do – that will always be my main job – but I was always that person who wanted to go back to work after children.

‘I wanted to do both. I don’t believe in 2024 that women should have to choose. And I’m not ashamed of the fact that I love working – that is my biggest buzz.’

She and Marvin split the childcare 50/50, with help from her mum, sitting down every week to plan the logistics of their busy lives.

‘Some weeks we don’t know how we’re going to pull it off,’ Rochelle admits. ‘We have this thing that we can’t always shine at the same time.

‘Last year was really busy for Marvin: he had a tour with JLS, then he went into the jungle [for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here], so my work was very much in school hours.

Marvin jetted off to Australia late last year to take part in I'm A Celeb while Rochelle stayed at home to look after their children - making sure she was around to do the school run

‘We try to make sure one of us is stable and around for the kids, that it’s always us – or my mum – doing the school run.’

As for the impact of fame, hers is a starrier existence than most.

Her Instagram account is filled with glamorous snapshots of her daily life: photoshoots, awards dos, designer clothes, plush family holidays to the Maldives and Dubai. But she insists: ‘I’m not really part of that crazy world.’

Rather, she is happiest at weekends, at home in her slippers, cooking roast chicken and playing silly games with her kids.

‘As I’ve become older I’ve got good at structuring my time,’ she says. ‘I work from home on a Friday and from then until Monday, that’s family time.

‘When the kids are in bed, I can really switch off. I have a bath and I’m on the phone to my girlfriends until I’m shrivelled like a prune.’

To keep her children grounded – no easy feat when both your parents are in the public eye – she regularly ‘checks-in’ with how they’re feeling.

‘Talking about mental health is quite grown-up and a lot of big ideas are thrown around for little minds,’ Rochelle says.

‘I don’t make those conversations grown-up; we chat on the way back from school, at bathtime or over dinner.

‘It’s not about labelling it, it’s about asking them how they feel and why they feel that.’

She recently made the decision to share images of her children on social media – something of a rarity in the celebrity world. So what changed?

‘I got to the stage where my eldest was asking me why she wasn’t on social media when some of her friends were [on their parents’ accounts],’ she explains. ‘I didn’t want them to think I was leaving them off or that I wasn’t proud of them: they are the biggest part of my life.

‘They’re not on my feed every day or in every post, but they are on there now. It’s the way the world moves.’

She is ‘very strict’ on her children’s use of screens and the internet, though she is, reluctantly, considering buying Alaia-Mai a phone for her 11th birthday.

‘I’ve kicked it down the road for as long as possible but I think the time has come,’ she sighs. ‘I just want to keep them protected. There is so much for parents to do and monitor.’

It’s a concern that will chime with parents everywhere.

For she may be a popstar, presenter and enviably successful business-boss, but talking to Rochelle Humes, it turns out, is just like talking to any other busy, working mum trying to do her best for her family.

As she puts it: ‘We’re all scrambling through life.’

*Rochelle Humes is an M&S x YoungMinds Partnership Ambassador. A 5p donation from every Farmhouse Loaf sold at M&S will go to YoungMinds, its charity partner since 2023, as part of a mission to raise £5 million over the next three years.