Kate: My family joy ... and my struggle against mum guilt
THE Duchess of Cambridge today gives an unprecedented insight into her personal life, revealing that she suffers constant guilt as she juggles motherhood and work.
In an extraordinary interview – one of the most intimate ever given by a senior Royal – she shares her anxieties and doubts about parenting.
Admitting that she and William ‘totally underestimated’ the impact of the arrival of her first child, Prince George, she says: ‘William was like, “Oh my gosh, is this what parenting is going to be like?”.
‘It took us a bit of time to get ourselves settled and going again... You are pulled to your toughest and most unknown places that you hadn’t necessarily even thought about.’
Asked if she suffers from ‘mum guilt’, she says: ‘Yes, absolutely, and anyone who doesn’t as a mother is actually lying.’ In words that will resonate with parents, she tells of questioning her own decisions and judgements. ‘I think that starts from the moment you have a baby,’ she says.
As well as discussing the challenges of motherhood, the Duchess is endearingly candid about its joys, declaring herself ‘a hands-on mum’.
Of holding George for the first time, she recalls how it felt ‘amazing, amazing... How can the human body do that?’.
Coming out of the hospital after George was born in 2013, was ‘slightly terrifying’, she reveals, but insists, however, that it was important to her and William to be able to ‘share that joy with the public’.
Life, she admits, can be ‘a bit hectic’ with her three children – Prince George, six, Princess Charlotte, four, and 22-monthold Prince Louis.
She says: ‘You’re pulled in all sorts of directions, because when the third comes along, how can you physically get all three children out of the car at the same time? You can’t.’
Given her time again, she says she would have ‘done things differently’ during her pregnancy. And she wishes she had ‘written to myself at the beginning of my pregnancy with my first child because... I’ve learnt a huge amount that I would really love to go back and tell myself’.
The Duchess gave the interview to the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast, hosted by Giovanna Fletcher, wife of McFly musician Tom Fletcher, to promote the Duchess’s landmark survey, Five Big Questions on the Under Fives, which aims to help ‘build the healthiest generation in history’.
It was recorded during a visit to London Early Years Foundation’s Stockwell Gardens Nursery in London last month. In it, the Duchess also reveals:
▪ She used ‘hypnobirthing techniques’ to cope with the pain of labour;
▪ William found it hard to see her suffering with severe morning sickness – and felt powerless to help;
▪ Her husband practised strapping a doll into a car seat so he wouldn’t struggle in front of the cameras outside hospital when George was born;
▪ Details of her ‘very happy’ childhood and how she has come to appreciate the sacrifices her parents made since becoming a mother.
Last night, the Duchess released a new photograph she took of Princess Charlotte crouching down to smell the scent of a bluebell on a countryside walk, to coincide with the release of the podcast.
Part of her mission, she says, is to reduce judgment and the ‘stigma’ surrounding parenting and motherhood.
She seems to suggest that social media played a role in creating the unrealistic impression that some people ‘are doing it publicly “very well” and they’ve got no challenges at all and this idea that everything is hunky-dory’.
In what might be seen as a political intervention, the Duchess says it is ‘crazy’ that nearly £17billion is spent on ‘late intervention’ to help deal with the after-effects, such as crime, caused by children and young adults who were not nurtured in the first years of life.
The figures are taken from a 2016 report compiled by the Early Intervention Foundation which looked at problems that affect young people such as domestic violence and abuse, child neglect and maltreatment, mental health problems, youth crime and exclusion from education and jobs.
The Duchess, who has been speaking to doctors, scientists, parents and carers about the topic over the past eight years, says: ‘It’s crazy – not only because it’s an economic cost but because there is a huge social cost to our communities and our societies. So that’s really why I’m doing this.
‘It’s going to take a long time – I’m talking about a generational change – but hopefully this is the first small step: to start a conversation.’
THE Duchess of Cambridge’s honest and candid thoughts about motherhood, which The Mail on
Sunday publish today, will strike a chord with every parent.
She spoke as she launched her national survey – ‘five questions for the under-fives’– seeking to discover our most profound and urgent hopes for future generations.
She comes across as being full of common sense, ready to share it, aware of her own good fortune but also aware that others do not have it, anxious to use her own experience to help others.
Parenthood is a subject that really matters – and one for which we are not given any systematic education or training.
The confidence and security of young mothers and the way in which babies and young children are raised have profound and lasting effects on the whole of society.
As the Duchess says, many of our deepest social problems can be traced back to the earliest years of our lives. A good, stable upbringing makes it much more likely that such problems will be avoided. She is right that it is a sad reality that what we experience in our childhood – especially if it is bad – can have a lifelong impact on our future health and happiness.
At a time when the Royal Family are beset from all sides, this is a perfect example of what they are good at, their ability to relate – as a family – to everyone.
The knowledge that, at the highest level of our country, there are people who share and care about such concerns helps to bind us together in a way that politicians never can, and never should.