Kate's Bond Wit Her Boys

Balancing royal privilege and middle-class values, the Princess of Wales is guiding and shaping the next generation of Windsor men

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King Charles III had a famously formal relationship with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In her 2017 book Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, author Sally Bedell Smith wrote that the 76-year-old monarch's parents "only saw their children after breakfast and tea time." His first wife, Princess Diana, broke the cycle, insisting on forging a new parenting path before her untimely death in 1997. "I remember [her] telling me that she wanted her [sons Prince William, 42, and Prince Harry, 40] to be brought up in a way no other royal princes had been," former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond wrote in The i Paper in December. "And she did her best to give them an idea of what life beyond the palace walls is like," from secret trips to McDonald's to clandestine vacations to Disney World.

William and his wife, Princess Kate, she added, "have gone further." While they can't change the fact that their kids, Prince George, 11, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, 7, "have been born into an extraordinary destiny," the former royal correspondent explained, "they've also given them a taste of a more ordinary existence."