Prince George, Princess Charlotte & Prince Louis Talk About Their Feelings ‘Too Much’ According to Dad Prince William
While some parents struggle to get their kids to open up, Prince William has the opposite problem. He just revealed that his children Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, 7, with wife Kate Middleton, talk about their feelings “too much” in a new interview.
In a Feb. 18 appearance on BBC Radio 1’s Life Hacks: Mental Health Special, he said his kids talk about their feelings “sometimes too much,” before backtracking. “I get all the details, which I love, you know, it’s amazing,” he continued, per E! News.
He then shared that doesn’t always like to hear about his children’s feelings because it makes him want to “fix” everything for them. “You feel a sense that you need to fix it, for everyone and that I find quite difficult,” William explained. “I have to remind myself that you don’t need to fix everything, but you need to listen and it’s important just to be OK with those feelings and those comments.”
“You’re going to have uncomfortable emotions and you’re going to have really great emotions, there’s a huge spectrum of in between,” he added.
Growing up royal, Prince William was likely raised in an environment where kids should be “seen and not heard,” so it’s easy to see where his uncomfortableness is coming from. Maybe this experience with talking to his kids about their feelings will help him learn to gentle-parent himself and learn that it’s OK to express feelings and sit in those bad moments before moving on, instead of just pushing them away.
In the interview, Prince William shared that he has been looking into why previous generations felt they couldn’t talk about problems with mental health. “I think the situation with the World Wars, generations before us couldn’t talk about their emotions,” he said. “They saw and they went through some really horrendous things that no matter how much you try and talk about it, it wouldn’t have really helped anyone. So they, as a generation, decided, probably not deliberately, but they just kept to themselves.”
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Now he is trying hard to “break that cycle” and encourage kids to “talk about your emotions.” “You can’t just bottle them up and pretend they don’t exist,” he added. (Even if it is challenging for parents to hear about it sometimes because we don’t want our kids to hurt.)
The Princess of Wales has long advocated for kids’ mental health. In a Feb. 2023 campaign called “Shaping Us,” which spotlighted the impact early childhood interventions can have on physical and mental health, Middleton said, “It is essential, to not only understand the unique importance of our earliest years, but to know what we can all do to help raise future generations of happy, healthy adults.”
A few months later, she visited the Anna Freud Centre in London, where she wrote about the importance of mental health. “It is so important that we all talk about our feelings and emotions,” she wrote on Instagram afterward. “The good ones and the more difficult ones too, because we all have them.”
Before you go, click here to see the best photos of the royal family at Trooping the Colour over the years.