Dilly Carter on her 'very functional' relationship with her parents following her adoption aged three
The Sort Your Life Out star speaks about her adoption on the show tonight…
Sort Your Life Our star Dilly Carter speaks about her adoption as a child on tonight’s show (March 24), with the star telling adoptive dads Big Craig and Little Craig: “I get that whole process.”
Dilly has previously been open about her adoption. Sri Lankan-born Dilly, 45, was abandoned as a baby and adopted when she was three years old. And her adoptive mother is actually the reason that she became an expert in decluttering…
Dilly Carter shares her adoption story
Sort Your Life Out star Dilly was adopted when she was three years old after being abandoned as a baby at a Sri Lankan orphanage. Dilly was adopted by English mum Freda and Sri Lankan dad Daya.
“They rescued me, aged three, from a Sri Lankan orphanage. Abandoned there as a baby, all I had was the metal cot I slept in and an uncertain future. Without Freda, who couldn’t get pregnant and was the driving force behind my adoption, I dread to think how my life might have turned out,” Dilly told the Mail back in 2023.
Speaking to Adoption UK, she also described her relationship with her adoptive parents as “very functional”. However, she added: “But I was never short of love. My parents were working so hard to give me a lovely life, but we didn’t spend a lot of time together.”
Speaking to Good Housekeeping at the start of 2025, Dilly echoed the same sentiment. However, she added: “We lived in a semi-detached house on a lovely cul-de-sac, and I never wanted for anything.”
The star also shared that she didn’t have any professional help to understand and process her life story until she was an adult.
Dilly Carter’s tribute to her adoptive mum
Back in 2024, as Freda celebrated her 83rd birthday, Dilly shared a picture of the pair and told her mum: “I never underestimate just how much you have been through from such a young age. An early hysterectomy lead you to adopt, and thank goodness you did. But what made you adopt? What made you think back then in the mid-70s that was the thing to do?
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“It wasn’t easy, especially being married to a very proud Sri Lankan man who didn’t ever discuss I wasn’t his natural daughter. He hid my adoption files under the bed and rarely spoke of it. But you both did it, spent hours filling forms, writing letters, visiting courts, going back and forth to Sri Lanka, until you finally brought me back to England in 1983.”
Touching on Freda’s mental health struggles, she added: “Since then you both worked tirelessly to give me a good life but in the end it affected your own so severely it impacted your mental health, your marriage and your ability to work. The way you both worked yourself into the ground will always be my reminder of why we work to live, not live to work.”
Freda lived in her own self-contained flat at the end of Dilly’s home for years. However, at the end of 2024, she moved her into a care home. “Sometimes the hardest things to do are also the kindest things to do, for everyone involved,” she said at the time.
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On her mum’s bipolar, and how it decided her career path
Dilly started to declutter from a young age to help her mother, who has bipolar disorder. Dilly wrote on her website: “I started my business as my mother has bipolar and her home was in chaos.”
The star added that, growing up, she “often felt suffocated by the clutter” at home. As a result, she moved out aged 18 to live in a flatshare with a friend.
Dilly also told the Mail: “It was the experience with Mum that pushed me towards setting up my business in the first place. Who better to sympathise with and understand the difficult and chaotic situations people can get into than me, having lived amid clutter for all those years and seen how it affected my mum’s mental health?”
And that’s why she’s a natural on Sort Your Life Out. She told Good Housekeeping: “I’m tough. But people need tough love. I spent the first three years of my life in an orphanage [in Sri Lanka], so I don’t feel emotional attachments to things. I had no one, so people matter to me, not possessions. Nothing is irreplaceable.
“But also, I’m the first one to cry. I get emotional because I can empathise. I’ve been through so much in my life. I understand where people are coming from, how they’ve ended up living that way, and I know how to help them out of it.”
Read more: Sort Your Life Out spin-off announced with Stacey Solomon replaced as host
