Prince William is adamant that his children have a “relatively normal home life,” despite their royal titles.
“I do try and stick to school timetables as best as possible. So, most days we’re in and out of school doing pick-ups and drop-offs,” William, 43, said during his recent appearance on Eugene Levy’s The Reluctant Traveler series. “Getting the balance of work and family life right is really important because, for me, the most important thing in my life is family.”
William and his wife, Princess Kate Middleton, have been married since 2011. They share sons Prince George, 12, and Prince Louis, 7, as well as daughter Princess Charlotte, 10.
“Everything is about the future,” William explained on the Apple TV+ docuseries. “If you don’t start the children off now with a happy, healthy, stable home, I feel you’re setting them up for a bit of a hard time and a fall. I think it’s really important that that atmosphere is created at home. You have to have that warmth, that feeling of safety, security, love. That all has to be there.”
Princess Kate Middleton and Prince William have opened up about their parenthood journey on multiple occasions while raising Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. The Prince and Princess of Wales wed in April 2011 at Westminster Abbey. Kate announced in December of the following year that she was pregnant with their first child. George […]
According to William, he learned similar lessons from his mother, Princess Diana, who was killed in an August 1997 car crash years after divorcing husband King Charles III.
“You take that and you learn from it and you try and make sure you don’t [make] the same mistakes as your parents,” William said in the episode. “I think we all try and do that and I just want to do what’s best for my children, but I know that the drama and the stress when you’re small really affects you when you’re older.”
Despite William and Kate, 43, trying to keep their children humble, they are also aware that George will one day become the king of England. (George is second in the line of succession behind William.)
“It’s an interesting question, and it’s a big question,” William told Levy, 78, when asked about his child one day becoming a monarch. “There’s lots of things to think about with that. But obviously, I want to create a world in which my son is proud of what we do, a world and a job that actually does impact people’s lives for the better.”
He continued, “I hope we don’t go back to some of the practices in the past that [Prince] Harry and I had to grow up in, and I’ll do everything I can to make sure we don’t regress in that situation.”
William and his younger brother, from whom the Prince of Wales is currently estranged, had dealt with an overwhelming amount of media attention from a young age.
“When it’s to do with family and things like that, then that’s where I start getting a bit overwhelmed, as I think most people would,” William explained on the show, making a rare comment about his strained sibling dynamics. “It’s more personal, it’s more about feeling, it’s more about upsetting the rhythm.”
As for Harry, 41, he and wife Meghan Markle moved away from England to settle in California in 2020.