Charlotte's ROYAL CHILDHOOD

KIND, ATHLETIC, COMPETITIVE AND JOYFUL, PRINCESS CHARLOTTE IS THRIVING AS HER PARENTS RAISE HER AND HER BROTHERS TO BE MODERN ROYALS.

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THE lives of royal children aren’t always the stuff of fairytales. King Charles III, 76, had a famously formal relationship with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. The monarch’s parents “only saw their children after breakfast and teatime,” Sally Bedell Smith wrote in 2017’s Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life. Princess Diana took a very different approach to raising sons Prince William, 43, and Prince Harry, 41, before her death 28 years ago. “I remember [her] telling me that she wanted her two boys to be brought up in a way no other royal princes had been,” former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond wrote last year. “And she did her best to give them an idea of what life beyond the palace walls is like.” William and wife Princess Kate, 43, she added, “have gone further” with their own kids. While they can’t change “that their children have been born into an extraordinary destiny,” Bond explained, “they’ve also given them a taste of a more ordinary existence.”

And that’s making all the difference — especially for their only daughter, Princess Charlotte. A change in British law makes her the first British princess in history to rank above a brother in the line of succession. The 10-year-old is also the first young senior royal to wear colorful nail polish, like other girls her age, in a public setting, with her mani delighting fans at July’s Wimbledon tennis championships. That pop of pink is just one sign William and Kate are raising Charlotte and her brothers, Prince George, 12, and Prince Louis, 7, to be modern royals while striving to make their lives as normal as possible. “They take pride in being hands-on parents,” a source tells