Sir Keir Starmer said he is kept up at night worrying about the impact of his job on his family.
As the general election approaches, Sir Keir said he wants to “desperately try to protect” his two teenage children and keep them out of the public eye.
The Labour leader also said his wife Victoria Starmer was his “complete support”.
Speaking on Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips programme, Sir Keir said: “Vic, my wife is fantastic, she is my complete support and partner in this.
“She doesn’t do anything publicly; she wants to get on with her job, she works for the NHS, we’ve got two relatively young children … but it impacts them all of the time, every single day.
“And all of that I do, I talk through with Vic, all the big decisions, the ones which we sit and talk thorough at home, and that is a good thing except I’m not sure she signed up for this.”
He added: “The only thing that keeps me up at night, the only thing that worries me is our children, because they’re 13 and 15, that’s difficult ages.
“It will impact them, we don’t name them in public, we don’t do photographs with them, they go to the local school and I just desperately try to protect them in that way, but I know it’s going to be harder and I do worry about that.”
Sir Keir also raised concerns about the level of threats and abuse directed at MPs.
When asked about protests focused on the war in Gaza, he said: “Beyond the formal protests there have been a number of threats and abuse to individuals, particularly some MPs, which I’m very concerned about, the level of threats that are being made to a number of MPs, including some within my own party, but not just within my own party.
“So I fiercely defend the right to protest, including on this issue of course, but I don’t think we can escape the fact that there are these threats, not necessarily in the protests, in and around that we must be very very careful about.
“We’ve lost parliamentary colleagues in the past and so this isn’t just some idle discussion, it is a very serious issue.”