Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, are currently in Australia on a non-royal visit. It’s their first visit since 2018 and their first since relinquishing their royal status. While in Australia, Prince Harry shared some candid quotes about parenting at a Movember event in Melbourne.
“Becoming a dad makes you think differently about everything,” the Duke said. “You want to be the best version of yourself for your kids, but there’s no manual for it – and that can be confronting at times, because you’re figuring it out as you go.”
Harry was joining Dr Zac Seidler, Global Director of Research at the Movember Institute, at Whitten Oval, home of the Western Bulldogs. The footie team also gifted him jerseys for his two children, Archie and Lilibet.
At the discussion, Prince Harry shared that there is a lot of pressure on parents to provide. However, remarked that it’s difficult to get the balance right, and kids know a lot more than you realise.
“Kids pick up on your energy far more than you realise. I found that if I came home stressed, the moment I held my son, he would feel it straight away – there was no hiding it.”
He got candid and shared how he deals with the pressure of parenthood:
“For me, it became about doing the work on myself – almost cleansing the past – so I could show up as the best version of myself for my kids. You don’t have to wait for a crisis to do that work; it can be about getting ahead of it.”
Keep up with Prince Harry’s visit on our live blog here.
In her podcast, Meghan Markle revealed that she experienced postpartum preeclampsia — a rare but serious condition. It can involve high blood pressure and signs of organ damage.
In October 2023, Meghan and Prince Harry candidly spoke about parenting their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
The Sussexes had organised a panel discussion as part of their work for Archewell Foundation for World Mental Health Day. Among the speakers were parents who have experienced loss connected to their children’s social media use.
Harry acknowledged it wouldn’t have been easy for the panellists to share their respective journeys. He and Meghan also thanked them for their contributions. The couple then shared their own experiences with young children.
“Being a mum is the most important thing in my entire life,” Meghan said. “Outside, of course, being a wife to this one,” she sweetly added, pointing to Harry.
“They say being a parent, the days are long but the years are short, so it worries me, but I’m also given a lot of hope and energy by the progress we’ve made in the past year being able to have these incredible parents, these survivors of these experiences, share their stories.”
The duchess also emphasised that, though her kids are “really young”, she fears the future implications of social media.
“Social media isn’t going away,” she said. “By design, there was an entry post that was supposed to be positive and create community. But something has devolved, and there’s no way to hear that and not try to help these families have their stories be heard.”
Harry continued: “I think for us, for myself and my wife, with kids growing up in a digital age, the priority here is to again turn pain into purpose and provide as much support as well as a spotlight and a platform for these parents to come together, to heal, to grieve and to also collectively focus on solutions so that no other family anywhere has to go through what they’ve been through.”
This panel marked Harry and Meghan’s first return to New York since the couple were involved in a “near-catastrophic” car chase in the city. Along with Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, on May 16, 2023, the pair were pursued by photographers for 75 minutes following a charity event in Manhattan.
“This relentless pursuit, lasting over two hours, resulted in multiple near collisions involving other drivers on the road, pedestrians, and two NYPD officers,” a spokesperson revealed in a statement.
A terrifying moment for the couple, who were no doubt reminded of Princess Diana’s last moments. In 1997, Harry’s late mother and her partner, Dodi Fayed, were pursued by paparazzi. It ended in a fatal crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. In his contentious memoir Spare, Harry confessed he has since visited the site.
“I wanted to see whether it was possible, driving at the speed that [Diana’s driver] Henry Paul was driving, that you could lose control of a car and plough into a pillar, killing almost everybody in that car,” the 39-year-old wrote. “I need to take this journey; I need to ride the same route. He continued, “I sat back. Quietly, I said: ‘Is that all of it? It’s…nothing. Just a straight tunnel.’ I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel. No reason anyone should ever die inside it.”
