Prince William and Kate are often seen doing the morning drop-offs to ensure their children – Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 11, and Prince Louis, eight – have as normal a childhood as possible.
But in what can only be described as a full-on Amandaland moment, our future king took to the airwaves, describing on Heart Radio’s breakfast show that his mornings are often total chaos on the way to deliver their kids to the £10,669 a term Lambrook School, near Ascot, with Prince Louis messing the car up with his sticky snacks.
“Yes, there’s a lot of jam sandwiches taken in the car, usually. Louis is very kind. He’ll leave jam fingerprints throughout the car, which is really helpful,” William reported to the nation. “It depends if there is a guitar lesson going on in the morning, a music lesson... you’ve got to get the guitar in the car,” William continued, casually dropping his ability to multitask.
“‘No, we’re not taking the guitar and we need to take the bag for school’. ‘Are we boarding, are we not?’ ‘Are we seeing friends?’ ‘No we’re not’.”
His children also bicker in the car, apparently, with him admitting while giving them a shout-out on air: “Charlotte and Louis, as George was boarding last night... if you’re listening to this, please make sure you are on time,” he said. “Make sure you’re not fighting over who’s listening to what this morning.”
It all sounds like a very bog standard morning in the day in the life of a parent – and I love the fact William is such a hands-on dad, but are we really going to be taken in by this? I think not.
The rest of us are hopping on buses, trains, or driving in clapped-out cars, as in my case, with the wing mirror broken as somebody drove into it last week and I’ve stuck it back on with Sellotape.
Most of us don’t have a valet to clean sticky finger marks from our leather seats and I’d posit most family cars are unsalvageable from all the slime and Nutella pancakes, with breadsticks wedged in between the seatbelt sockets so deep, it’s now impossible to remove them.
We also aren’t followed to school by police protection officers or have helicopters at the ready if we’re returning from a half-term break in the countryside and need to make a quick dash to the school gate, or, for that matter, fuss about remembering who’s boarding where that week. Because, guess what, nobody is.
While our kids play out on the street, or take a trip to Alton Towers, the Wales’s brood get to hang out on Buckingham Palace’s balcony for a RAF flypast.
We don’t have permanent nannies on top of oodles of other staff at the click of our fingers to organise the mornings like clockwork, should we ever need a break, or are working. Now that would take the pressure off.
The demands of child rearing in a cost of living epidemic, where childcare is out of reach for many average households, is hard – and the minor details of sticky finger marks on a car seat, are the least of our worries.
We also aren’t followed to school by police protection officers or have helicopters at the ready if we’re returning from a half-term break in the countryside and need to make a quick dash to the school gate
William isn’t the only high-profile parent who wants us to show off his “real credentials”, but it has a whiff of cosplay desperation about it. Hollywood couple, Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes, have been at it too, talking about chaotic morning drop-offs in Hampstead, of their daughters Esmerelda, 11, and Amada Lee, nine.
Mendes spoke candidly on the Parenting & You with Dr Shefali podcast about her biggest personal struggle as a parent: avoiding “the rushing and the yelling” during high-pressure moments like the school run, which she finds exhausting to override with calmness in the morning panic.
Meanwhile, Rochelle Humes, who shares Alaia-Mai, 13, Valentina, nine, and Blake, five, with husband Marvin Humes, often documents the crazy morning rush to school and reveals she gets up before the kids at 5.30 or 6am to have a minute to herself.
“Carnage – it’s absolute carnage! There is no way to dress it up,” Humes told Closer magazine last year. Coleen and Wayne Rooney also like to make out they are the just your normal parents on the go, with Colleen claiming on the Stick to Football podcast last year that she “deals with murder every morning” getting her boys Kai, 16, Klay, 13, Kit, 10 and Cass, eight, to school, and reportedly cooks them four different breakfasts everyday to cater for their individual tastes, and has a strict car seating rota to “control the madness” on the school run.
While mum of five Stacey Solomon describes the school run like a “military operation” with their blended family, including her children Zachary, 18, Leighton, 14, Rex, seven, Rose, four, and three-year-old Belle, complete with an intense morning routine starting at 5.30am and ending by 9.15am.
“We have four school runs. My eldest goes to college, the next one’s at senior school, the next one’s at primary, and the youngest is at nursery. So there are four different schools,” Solomon said on the Nearly Parents podcast with Jamie Laing and Sophie Habboo.
Of course there is something refreshing about celebrities admitting that parenting isn’t always glamorous and not always inundating us with their seemingly picture-perfect lives on social media. But it just comes across as a bit, well, performative. Especially when you can afford the kind of help the rest of us could only dream about.
While we navigate the school class WhatsApp and competitiveness at the school gate, for them, it’s just on a different level. They may have downwardly mobile pretensions of living in their own episode of Amandaland, but their juggle is more likely to be of the multiple homes variety.
