King Charles Regrets the ‘Fashionable’ Way Prince William and Prince Harry Grew Up: Expert
King Charles III would probably do things differently if he had a do-over at parenting Prince William and Prince Harry. According to a royal expert, the king likely “regrets” the “freestyle” way the Prince of Wales, 41, and Duke of Sussex, 39, grew up in the British royal family.
Harry and William didn’t have ‘many’ boundaries growing up
As kids growing up at Kensington Palace and Highgrove, the world was, for the most part, William and Harry’s oyster. After all, they were the children of a future king, the then-Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
As such, the brothers largely had free rein to do “what they wanted.” Sure, they had a nanny not unlike other royal children. The lack of boundaries is what Ingrid Seward, a royal expert and editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine, thinks King Charles now regrets.
“I think Charles probably regrets that he wasn’t strict with Harry and William,” she said, noting the now-75-year-old went along with the late Diana’s “freestyle of bringing up children,” (via OK! Magazine).
“Diana allowed them to do, more or less, what they wanted, which was very fashionable in those days,” Seward said. “You let children just get on with things.”
“I think Charles probably regrets that he wasn’t a bit stricter,” she went on. “Because it might’ve given both boys a few more boundaries. Children all need boundaries, and I don’t think they had too many.”
William and Harry never saw enough of Charles and Diana growing up after the divorce
When King Charles and Diana’s marriage ended — they announced their separation in 1992 before divorcing in 1996 — William and Harry’s lives changed dramatically. As Harry recalled in Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, it involved “bouncing” between one parent and the other.
“There was the point of where our parents split,” he said in the 2017 HBO documentary, “and the two of us were bouncing between the two of them. We never saw our mother enough, or we never saw our father enough.”
Harry went on to recall arguments in the car with William. “There was a lot of traveling and a lot of fights on the back seat with my brother, of which I would win,” he said. “So there was all of that to contend with.”
“And I don’t pretend that we’re the only people to have to deal with that,” the now-father of two added. “But it was an interesting way of growing up.”
They had no familial ‘support structure’ after Princess Diana died
In his 2023 Netflix documentary, The Heart of Invictus, Harry shared he — and presumably William — needed a “support structure” after Diana died in August 1997. Harry was just shy of turning 13 when he lost his mother while William was 15.
He recalled how years of “trauma” related to Diana’s death came “fizzing out” after his 2012-2013 Afghanistan tour. Harry described “lying on the floor in the fetal position” as grief washed over him following his front-line service.
“Losing my mum [sic] at such a young age, the trauma that I had, I was never really aware of,” Harry said. “It was never discussed, I didn’t really talk about it, and I suppressed it like most youngsters would have done. But when it all came fizzing out, I was bouncing off the walls.”
“Like, ‘What is going on here? I’m now feeling everything as opposed to being numb.’ The biggest struggle for me was no one around me really could help,” he explained. “I didn’t have that support structure, that network, or that expert advice to identify what was actually going on with me.”
