A longtime royal photographer is opening up about how Prince William’s own difficult memories from his childhood, specifically, of growing up in the spotlight, are impacting how he’s parenting his three kids.
The Prince of Wales shares Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis with wife Kate Middleton, and they’re being raised very differently to the way William and younger brother Prince Harry were in the 1980s and 1990s. In the new documentary Prince George: How to Make a Monarch, veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards spoke of photographing a young William when he was on a ski vacation with his family (per Marie Claire).
Prince William, Princess Diana, and Prince Harry skiing on April 9, 1991.
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“I remember once when we were in Switzerland on a skiing trip and they would do a photo call, and I remember William saying to me, ‘Please, Arthur, no more pictures, no more pictures,’” Edwards said, per The Mirror.
Edwards clarified that the future king “was about 9 or 10” making the ski trip in 1991 or 1992. William—who, like Harry, grew up with constant camera shutters as their mother, Princess Diana, was the most photographed woman in the world before her death in 1997—was “very sad,” Edwards said of that ski trip. “He’s had enough of it, and when I think back to that, I think, ‘My God, how he suffered.’”
Prince William skiing on April 9, 1991.
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William was born in 1982, and Edwards has been photographing the royal family for The Sun since 1975, seven years before William’s birth and six years before Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s July 29, 1981 wedding. He’s photographed William his entire life and continues to, now that the Prince of Wales has built a family of his own. Edwards said in the documentary that William “was determined that wasn’t going to happen to his children.”
As evidenced by the recent Wales family holiday in Mustique—which happened last month when George, Charlotte, and Louis were on half-term break from school—William and Kate are keen to keep their family vacations private. It’s one part of their efforts to give their three kids as normal a childhood as possible, as was spoken about elsewhere in the Prince George: How to Make a Monarch documentary.
Prince William, Prince George, Prince Louis, Princess Kate, and Princess Charlotte attend the 2024 Christmas Morning Service at St. Mary Magdalene Church.
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“I think William and Kate making sure that George, Charlotte, and Louis have these normalizing experiences where they just interact with really normal people actually gives them that grounded sense that they are human beings like the rest of us,” psychotherapist Lucy Beresford said on the program.
She continued that the Prince and Princess of Wales want their children to know “they’re not rarefied, they’re not elevated,” and that their hope is to “hopefully dilute that sense of ‘I’m invincible.’”