Hi plant, the issue of Kate working vs. not and the perceived resentment it brings up is interesting. I’m 32 so squarely in the “old millennial” segment. I’m also a career woman with a MBA living in a high COL coastal city and most of my friends are also high-earning professionals as well. The trend of being very hands-on, even stay-at-home parenting is the ultimate status symbol in my cohort and I’ve known a lot of women who’ve made the conscious decision to leave or significantly dial back their high powered careers for stay at home parenting, at least while the kids are young. Now, a lot of it is an issue of numbers – in the US work life balance is notoriously poor (finance and law regularly requires 90 hr weeks, and that’s if your privelidged; otherwise you’re pulling in 4 fast food shifts just to make ends meet) and child care is prohibitively expensive. But even without those considerations, people in my set love to be “crunchy” in certain ways – organic farmer’s markets, home cooking, going to therapy, etc. I believe it has to do with a very specific generational backlash – from being raised in an era when divorce rates were at its peak, when postpartum depression wasn’t spoken of and parents just drank too much or popped Valium, when very lax parenting and TV dinners were acceptable to kids. So my generation wants to, and understands, the desire to be a very hands on, conscientious, kind parents. This is a very American perspective so we don’t have the burden of feeling like she’s sucking away at our tax dollars -but at least in my circle there is never any judgement of her not working. She seems like a great mother, and as a woman from a wealthy family business she likely would have taken time off to raise kids had she married someone else.
On the flip side, I think she and William may get a lot more judgement from this generation if they did Charles or even QE style parenting – nannies all the time, dragging them out for publicity, and boarding school ASAP. (Of course W+K have lots of help, but I doubt their nannies are the primary nurterer in their lives the way Charles’ or even Will’s nannies were.) This is the type of parental relationship our generation is working very hard to undo. In short, they still remain “aspirational” to us – bc given the same circumstances, I personally don’t think that I would make choices different from their’s.
Thanks for sending this in!
Oh, I don’t think there’s a lot of judgement outside of a few fandom pockets. I obviously have very specific ideas as how things should be done, but they are not widely shared. If work ethic were the be-all and end-all of popularity, then Anne would be the most popular royal, and she isn’t, not by a long shot, even among avowed monarchists.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/05/18/who-are-monarchists/
And, given the royals’ various parenting mishaps and what they’ve cost the crown, a good argument could be made that parenting should be Will and Kate’s number one priority. Also, their mental health work gets a lot more press than any number of ribbon-cuttings would get and their two-week-a-month schedule is optimized for maximum publicity. So they are effective at what they do.
I still believe they should get out more, they should embrace smaller patronages, and they should attend more ribbon-cuttings because I think this is the type of royal work that makes a difference in the long run. Being visible, participating in local celebrations, and supporting small events is, imo, just as important (maybe more) to national cohesion and royal imagery than splashy initiatives like Heads Together. A third of Britons have seen HM in person, compared to 5% for the younger royals. That figure really should go up, imo. One reason HM is so popular is the she has devoted her life to being a visible symbol of the country.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2018/05/17/almost-third-country-has-seen-or-met-queen-real-li/
But, I suspect, this is not a widely-held opinion. The work they do is effective and well-publicized and they are more popular than most of the other, harder-working royals. So people seem to like what they are doing. I suspect the work ethic issue is not as much of a negative as people think (although I personally do still feel strongly about it).
This theory will likely be tested in the upcoming months, as I believe KP will make a big “hard-working” pr push on behalf of Megs shortly. I’m very curious to see how that works out.
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