A royal expert has revealed the 'huge additional challenges' Prince George, Charlotte and Louis will face as they get older that their parents managed to avoid.
In an interview with Hello!'s podcast about the Royal Family, A Right Royal Podcast, journalist Victoria Murphy spoke about some of the unique challenges that Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis are set to face a very different landscape as they get older.
"I definitely think any public figure has huge additional challenges because of social media. I think that's really something that is going to come up for the next generation of royals," Victoria said as she explained that in the early noughties when William and Catherine met at university, social media and smartphones were not so readily available. "William and Kate, when they had their courtship, it wasn't in the internet age."
The expert then explained that when Prince William was at St Andrew's, a deal was struck with the press that he would take part in a photo op every so often, so long as the press left him alone.
In addition, Prince William's university friends were given this stark warning when he became a student. Dr Brian Lang, the Principal and Vice Chancellor of the university during William's time at St Andrew's told Hello!,"One thing that I did as soon as we knew that William was going to be a student, was to warn the student body that we expected them to respect privacy of information."
"So, I made it quite clear to the students by doing an interview to the student newspaper, in which I made it quite clear that we would take a very, very dim view of any inappropriate information being passed on. Not just about William, but about any other student," he said.
Victoria added that these privacy restrictions probably wouldn't 'translate' now. "Moving forward, how are they going to manage this for future generations? When William went to university, the media was off limits and in making the media coverage off limits, it meant that very little came out during his time at university, whereas that wouldn't necessarily translate now," she said.
Victoria then explained that the royal children will not have the luxury of the same kind of privacy, particularly if they decide to go to university, where they will be surrounded with peers who have phones and the ability to immediately share their location or their behaviour.
"If George, Charlotte or Louis go to university and the media is off limits, how do you police hundreds of university students with phones? How does that work? What does that mean for how their lives will have to play out or the people around them? So I think this is something that's going to be really quite fascinating to see how they manage this," she said.
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