The Duchess of Cambridge embraced her inner child and slid down a helter-skelter ride after joining Danish students using play to develop their teaching skills.
Screaming with laughter after emerging from the slide, she joked with the press saying “you stood far enough away!” adding “In the spirit of where I am, I had to do it.”
The duchess clearly enjoyed her visit to the Lego Foundation PlayLab at University College Copenhagen where students training to be early years professionals are encouraged to play.
Kate has flown to Copenhagen for a whistle-stop tour meeting health workers and academics at the forefront of Denmark’s world-leading approach to early childhood development, and the families that benefit.
After chatting to parents with their babies at Copenhagen’s Children’s Museum, the duchess confessed she felt “broody” and joked husband William worries about her working with under one-year-olds because she returns home wanting “another one”.
The duchess was tempted to take the slide after meeting the team leading a national programme training students to help children use play to develop skills for life.
Dressed in Denmark’s national colours – a red Zara blazer and white blouse – the future queen handed her handbag to an aide and whizzed down the ride when told some staff use it instead of taking the stairs.
She met young people studying under the Playful Learning programme – a partnership between six Danish university colleges and the Lego Foundation – where taking part in playful learning sparks enthusiasm in their profession and gives them the teaching qualities to support children’s social and emotional development through a playful approach.
Kate is spending two days in the Danish capital on a fact-finding visit with her Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood – the first time she has taken the work of her institution to the international stage.
The duchess revealed she had spent some of the recent half-term school break playing with Lego with her children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, who were envious when they learnt she would be visiting the Lego Foundation PlayLab.
“My children are very jealous they weren’t coming to see the Lego Foundation. They were like, ‘hang on, there’s Lego and we’re not coming?’” she said.
At the Children’s Museum, Kate heard about the Understanding Your Baby research project which trains health visitors to help new parents as they begin to notice and interpret their babies’ behavioural cues.
After meeting with two eight-month-old baby boys and their parents, she joked: “It makes me very broody.
“William always worries about me meeting under one-year-olds. I come home saying, ‘let’s have another one’.”
During the museum visit, Kate praised fathers for taking time off work to “get to know” their babies and she spoke of the universal struggle of parenthood where even the most well-educated can struggle to ask for help.
Told how even well-educated mothers and fathers struggle with feeling “insecure” about their parenting, she agreed: “(There is) the expectation that maybe they should know already.
“Whereas some of the more disadvantaged families probably have different challenges.”
And later she said certain “milestones” in a baby’s development were favoured over others: “There is a lot of talk about feeding and nutrition and physical milestones, but less on the emotional and social milestones.”
Kate’s commercial flight to Copenhagen had been delayed by about 30 minutes but she made up some of the time for her first event of the day a visit to University of Copenhagen.
The duchess chatted to researchers from the Copenhagen Infant Mental Health Project (CIMHP), which aims to promote the mental wellbeing of, and relationships between, infants and their parents.
Parents Nikolene and Nicolai Gudomlund told the duchess about a programme delivered by CIMHP psychologists they enrolled on after they became “completely panicked” by their son, now four, not making eye contact when a few months old.
Kate said: “There is so much joy and happiness associated with having a newborn baby but actually people don’t necessarily talk about the worry or the anxiety that comes with having a newborn, and particularly if you are noticing things with your own child that you feel you are worried about, and things.”
