Princess Kate - Royal Mom, Future Queen

From School Drop-Offs To State Banquets, The Royal Mom Of 3 Is Growing In Confidence—and Finding Her Purpose

- Simon Perry

She will one day be addressed as Your Majesty, but when Princess Kate enters the many meetings she has convened to support families with young children, she often introduces herself as Catherine. (She is properly called Your Royal Highness on first reference and Ma’am thereafter, but she’ll never issue a correction.) And from the moment she’s there, everyone in the room has her full attention. “I’ve sat in many a ministerial meeting, and [the U.K. government] minister will come and say their bit and go,” says Kate Stanley, director of strategy at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a prominent child-protection charity in the U.K. “But the duchess wouldn’t just join us, she would stay for the whole meeting”—sometimes for three hours at a time. “She has a deep curiosity to really understand the issues.”

For the mom of three, those issues hit especially close to home, where she is simply Mummy to Prince George, 6, Princess Charlotte, 4, and Prince Louis, 17 months. On Sept. 5 Kate and her husband, Prince William, dropped Charlotte and George off at Thomas’s Battersea, a private school some three miles from the family’s Kensington Palace home in London. Proudly walking with Charlotte as she joined George at school for the first time, Kate held her daughter’s hand until it was time to let go. “She’s so happy,” says a friend of Kate’s. “I think the three kids really complete her.”