What we love about Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is that the quietly spoken royal doesn’t pretend things are perfect when they’re not – especially when it comes to parenting.
While the mother of three is more fortunate than most in that she has the support of an in-home nanny and housekeeper, she is not exempt from the emotional challenges that come with being a parent.
This week the duchess helped launch a support line for the charity Family Action at its Lewisham headquarters – a service that provides support to parents in need – and she spoke at the event of the isolation many mothers feel when they’re caring for a baby.
“It’s so hard. You get a lot of support with the baby as a mother particularly in the early days, but after the age of one it falls away,” she said. “After that there isn’t a huge amount — lots of books to read.
“Everybody experiences the same struggle,” she added.
Catherine, who gave birth to her third child, Prince Louis, in April last year, spearheaded the mental health initiative, Heads Together, in 2016 with husband Prince William and her brother-in-law Prince Harry.
Under the initiative she has championed children’s and maternal mental health, and she has spoken at previous events about how isolation for mothers can lead to a “lack of confidence and feelings of ignorance”.
“Even for me, who has more support at home that most mothers do not. Nothing can really prepare you for the sheer, overwhelming experience of what it means to become a mother.
“For many mothers, myself included, this can at times lead to a lack of confidence and feelings of ignorance.”
WATCH: Prince George, Charlotte and Louis’ cutest moments. Story continues below.
Her admission has come in the same week as husband William’s shocking revelation that he, Catherine and Harry could not find a single celebrity who wanted to be involved with Heads Together before they launched it.
“We went out to a lot of people and nobody, before we started, was interested in being part of Heads Together, because it was mental health… that was three years ago. And that was a big deal.”
Now, William says things have slowly begun to change, “Once we started showing people a lot more of what we were going to do, people realised Catherine, Harry and I put our necks on the line here – that actually maybe it was OK, we could join.”
