How Kate Middleton is raising her children away from the royal way

The Princess of Wales has a ‘new way of doing things’ when it comes to raising her royal kids.

Kate will appear as well as William in season 6. Image: Instagram

The Princess of Wales is insisting on a revolutionary approach to raising a future King that could see the primary school-aged prince make history.

One of the most famous examples of royal parenting came in the 14th century when King Edward III decided to do a spot of it during the bloody Battle of Creçy in France.

With Edward was his 16-year-old son, the Black Prince, and like any sensible father, he thought the best thing was to get the lad to go off and do a bit of slaughtering, famously saying, “Let the boy earn his spurs”.

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Kate will appear as well as William in season 6. Image: Instagram

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Kate making her own parenting rules

Thankfully, things have changed a hell of a lot since then, and in six short years Prince George, soon to hit the big 1-0, won’t be sent off to take on the French while clanking about in freshly WD40-ed armour. (These days, the primary schooler is probably not allowed to even touch a ceremonial pair of spurs without a nanny, a medic and a trained safety officer on hand).

And leading the renegade royal parenting charge is none other than Kate, the Princess of Wales who has instead instituted what can only be described as a relatively radical new way of doing things.

Gone are the days of raising macho monarchs who are excellent at scaring the servants and hello to a new generation of HRHs who have a working knowledge of housework.

Decades from now, when the future King George VII is perched over the Stone of State trying to remember all the words to the coronation oath, he will be the first anointed monarch in history to have ever unpacked a dishwasher.

Now, this week, we have gotten a new view into the revolutionary approach that Kate – and Kate alone – is reportedly insisting on when it comes to raising George and his siblings Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.

When Queen Camilla wed her longtime boyfriend (did I gross you out a tad?) – now King Charles – in 2005, she made history as the first non-titled commoner gal to marry a future monarch in 450 years. Still, despite not having a grand appellation to slap on her thankyou cards, Camilla was still from decidedly upper crust stock, a woman who likely has never had to clean her own loo and whose only qualification is Swiss finishing school.

Thus when Kate got that famous sapphire engagement ring on her left hand in late 2010, reporters all got a bit breathless writing about how historic her union with Prince William would be. Here would be the first ever Queen to have a tertiary degree and a decent education that extended beyond conversational French and a quick bit of instruction about avoiding men with the surname Cromwell.

More importantly for our purposes here, she will be the first Queen to actually come from a normal, middle class background. While her mother Carole Middleton might have made millions out of her now-shuttered business Party Pieces, thus ensuring her kids could attend expensive schools, their background is all very capital ‘N’ normal.

Think lunches actually packed by their parents and not liveried staff and bedtimes managed by Carole herself and not stern matronly nannies in tweed skirts.

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We know where Prince Charlotte gets her cheeky personality from now! Image: Getty

A 'normal' background

Thus while much of that 2010 Kate has been shined up, buffed off and made over since she became a card-carrying HRH, including her acquiring a much crisper accent, she is reportedly sticking to her roots when it comes to raising her own children.

No swan sangers for recess, no stablehands forced to pretend to be foxes while young George gets a grip on his first Purdey shotgun and no letting little Louis borrow the family’s unparalleled collection of DaVinci sketches because he wants to practise his drawing.

Biographer Tom Quinn is the author of Gilded Youth, a book about behind-palace-gates child raising.

“I have heard that Kate has been very good at both accepting the way the system works, but also slightly subversively modifying it,” he told the Daily Beast this week.

Her starting point – husband Prince William, who has already done more parenting than centuries of forbidding, emotionally stunted heirs before him ever have combined.

“[The princess] insisted that William was involved in bedtime, reading to the kids and bathing them, and they split the school run,” Quinn has said.

That strategy of mucking in extends to their home life, where the trio of young HRHs are busy learning about the power of the pre-rinse and how to add their own milk to their Frosties.

While their family might have three grand and historic homes (Adelaide Cottage in Windsor, their four-storey Kensington Palace apartment and the ten-bedroom Norfolk weekender Anmer Hall), they are not attended to by a small battalion of staff.

The Beast’s Tom Sykes has reported that, according to his sources, “the children – and William – are expected to do regular chores, such as emptying the dishwasher, and tidy up around the house, and that they do not have a full time housekeeper specifically because Kate wants them to experience as much normality as possible, with her own middle class upbringing as the blueprint”.

RELATED: Prince George’s sweet nickname for Prince William

Prince William, Catherine and the children arrive at the coronation. Image: AFP

Another way that the princess is changing things up is by introducing her children to the misery of the British seaside holiday. While the Wales family has in the past enjoyed breaks on Mustique, regularly ski in Europe and last year toured Jordan, the prince and princess have also thrown much more quotidian, local getaways into the mix.

One surprising option chosen by William and Kate is the island of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly, a destination which is to sandy white Caribbean beaches what Nandos is to three-Michelin-star dining.

Still, if there is one way for the prince and princess to really feel like every other put upon set of parents in the world, then trying to fend off their kidlets’ demands for ice creams, while dusting sand off them, is a good start.

“On Tresco they are literally like any other family,” someone from their circle told Sykes.

“They fish for crabs off the pier and you’ll hear the kids demanding ice creams and the parents going, ‘No, no – oh, OK, but only if you’re good’. It’s clearly super important to them to just be normal. It’s incredibly impressive.”

Prince George to go to Eton like dad

While earlier this month the Telegraph reported that William, Kate and George had toured Eton, with the boy likely to be sent off there in a few years as his father was, in a more fundamental way, his youth is unlikely to be anything the Palace has ever seen before.

What could really make the difference for George (and Charlotte and Louis) isn’t that they necessarily will know the finer point of the rinse cycle but the unprecedented emotional and personal stability that Kate’s approach will hopefully afford them.

As Quinn points out, the young princes and princess “are different in that their mother is the first royal mother to have had a warm and affectionate childhood”.

George may well make history as the first person to wear the St Edwards’s Crown who will accede to the throne a genuinely happy human being; a man who has a clear sense of identity and has not been traumatised or damaged by his royal upbringing.

And even though both William and Kate are right now plugging away on big ambitious projects like helping with the climate crisis, ending homelessness and changing the way the UK raises children, their greatest legacy may be producing an heir and two spares who make it to adulthood emotionally healthy.

The bottom line: Hugs, helping with homework, and HRH-made ham sandwiches in Harrods lunch boxes could well do more for the 1000-year-old British monarchy than centuries of sending teenage princes off to “earn their spurs” on the battlefield.

Originally published as How Kate Middleton is raising her children away from the royal way