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Did Meghan Markle and Prince Harry break a promise and endanger their kids?
That’s what Meghan-hating royalists are saying.
They are, among other things, accusing the Duchess of Sussex of flat-out hypocrisy.
She sure picked a time to be between publicists, huh?
Did Meghan Markle break a family ‘promise’ regarding her kids?
Believe it or not, Archie is 6 years old. Lilibet is 4. (Feeling old, yet?)
All along, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have resolved to avoid showing their children’s faces.
This is both a privacy concern and a safety concern.
We live in a world where thousands of children have grown up with their entitled parents blasting their photos and videos and faces and private childhood moments across the internet. Many parents of young children are resolving to do better than that.
So why did the Duchess of Sussex include so much of her children in this fun, festive video?
It’s the most wonderful time of the year — that is, Halloween season.
On Sunday, October 26, the Duchess shared an Instagram video, captioned “Happy Sunday,” of Archie and Lilibet enjoying a pumpkin patch.
As usual, Meghan avoided direct footage of her children’s faces in this adorably orange video.
However, we can see more of Archie and Lilibet’s features than usual.
As a bonus, we get to see Harry carving a pumpkin. That, however, is not the focus of the “controversy.”
Glimpses at these royal babies are few and far between
See, what little of Lilibet’s face that viewers can make out is the most that anyone has seen since her official birthday portrait in 2022.
And Archie’s face was last seen in late 2021.
Still, most of what Meghan Markle is showing here is the backs of her children’s heads.
The sight of the back of someone’s head and their ear and jawline might be enough to recognize a close friend or loved one.
However, most people seeing this video wouldn’t recognize Archie or Lilibet if they passed them on the street. Not if they didn’t expect to encounter them.
Absurd royalists are now claiming that this video is some sort of betrayal of Meghan’s own expressed values.
Tom Sykes’ The Royalist substack calls the video an “extraordinary lapse.” And he’s not alone, with other Team William types calling out the Sussexes.
It seems that these folks wish to accomplish two things.
The first is to ridicule the intention of protecting the privacy and dignity of one’s children. Because Harry and Meghan do it, because William and Kate do not, or perhaps out of a general contempt for children’s rights.
And the second goal seems to be accusing Meghan and Harry of hypocrisy for breaking a promise that they did not break, a promise that these same critics do not personally endorse.
So why is there this backlash?
Truth be told, we can’t say that we fully understand the people who seem eager or even desperate to see the faces of celebrity children.
It’s not an urge that we have. In turn, we don’t understand the anger and fury that we so frequently see expressed in social media comments from people quaking with rage at celebrity parents who hide their kids’ faces.
But, at the end of the day, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry (but mostly Meghan) aren’t really getting anger for the normal reasons.
If she showed nothing, she’d get hate for “hiding” her kids. Showing her children’s faces would bring joy but similar “haha, you broke your own rule” backlash. This harmless half-measure is getting similar hate.
It’s not because people love children’s faces or whatever. And it isn’t about hypocrisy, real or imagined. So many people (mostly in the UK, let’s be real) are so accustomed to hating Meghan that it is a reflex. It lacks rhyme and reason.
Meghan Markle Accused of Breaking ‘Promise’ Over Kids’ Safety, Being … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.