Raising a Baby Queen: The Brutal Truth About Royal Parenting

At precisely 4:12 on a Tuesday morning, I found myself executing a deep, entirely unironic bow to a person who had just soiled herself up to the shoulder blades. My mother-in-law had visited the day before, bearing a rhinestone-encrusted tiara and loudly declaring that she had come to see her "little royal highnesses." She had then left, taking her peaceful adult life with her, leaving me alone with two screaming two-year-old twins and a vague, terrifying concept of what it means to raise an infant monarch.

The baby advice industry loves this narrative. They want you to believe that treating your child like royalty means purchasing a £400 cashmere vomit-catcher, playing Mozart at deafening volumes to stimulate their genius, and curating a nursery that looks like it belongs in an architectural digest rather than a house where people actually live and occasionally bleed. But the more time I spent staring blankly at the wall at 3 AM while covered in an unidentifiable bodily fluid, the more I realised we've completely misunderstood the assignment.

If you look at how the actual British royals operate—the historical ones, the late Queen Elizabeth II types—they're not swanning about in disposable luxury. They're stoic, they wear hand-me-downs that are decades old, they spend an uncomfortable amount of time freezing in the Scottish rain, and they turn off the lights when they leave a room to save the electricity bill. It turns out that genuine royal parenting isn't about excess at all, which is incredibly convenient for those of us whose bank accounts have been decimated by the sheer cost of nappies.

Why a muddy pram is the ultimate royal carriage

There was a week around the four-month mark where Twin A (Florence) decided that sleep was a construct of the weak, and Twin B (Matilda) decided to loudly support this political movement. I was reading a wildly expensive sleep-training book that suggested I simply project a calm, authoritative aura, which I found deeply unhelpful while I was actively vibrating with exhaustion.

In a fit of pure desperation, I shoved them both into their pram and marched out into the bleak, drizzly reality of a London autumn. I just walked. I walked until I couldn't feel my hands, navigating cracked pavements and dodging aggressively confident pigeons. And miraculously, within twenty minutes, the screaming stopped. They were out cold.

An exhausted nurse at our local NHS clinic later muttered something to me about circadian rhythms and daylight exposure. The science is slightly beyond my sleep-deprived brain, but my rough understanding is that physically assaulting your child's eyeballs with natural daylight forces their internal biological clock into submission, tricking their tiny pineal glands into producing melatonin when it actually matters. The late Queen apparently forced her entire family to march across the moors in gale-force winds to build character, and frankly, she was onto something. You don't need a white noise machine shaped like a sheep that plays the sound of a mother's heartbeat; you just need a sturdy pair of wellies and the sheer stubbornness to endure a bit of mud.

The royal wardrobe is shockingly boring

If you want to spot a commoner, look for the baby wearing a stiff denim jacket with a meaningless slogan printed on the back. The sheer volume of absolute rubbish we bought in the first few months is staggering, mostly because you're panic-buying at 2 AM on your phone while a small human uses your chest as a trampoline.

We eventually learned that if you want clothes that actually survive the relentless onslaught of bodily functions, you've to go boring. You need things that stretch, breathe, and can be boiled alive in a washing machine without turning into a crumpled rag.

For us, the absolute workhorse of the nursery has been the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It’s sleeveless, which means you don't have to engage in the terrifying wrestling match of forcing a fragile, flailing arm down a tight tube of fabric. The organic cotton seriously makes a massive difference, as we discovered when we put Florence in a synthetic supermarket onesie and her chest instantly broke out in a rash that closely resembled the London Tube map. This Kianao one is soft, it stretches exactly where you need it to when you're trying to contain a blowout, and we've washed it so many times it should logically have dissolved into dust by now, but it hasn't.

On the flip side, someone gifted us the Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Bodysuit, and while it's undeniably gorgeous and made from the same great material, I must issue a mild warning. If you're anywhere near the weaning stage, those adorable fluttery sleeves will act as a magnetic net for mashed banana and pureed carrots, ensuring that your baby looks like they’ve just lost a fight with a root vegetable within three seconds of sitting in the high chair.

If you're desperately trying to stock your own nursery with things that won't make you wince or require a small mortgage, visiting Kianao’s baby essentials collection is a mildly less chaotic place to start.

When the tiny monarch screams

The most toxic lie peddled by the parenting advice industrial complex is that you can somehow manipulate a completely helpless potato of a human into being independent. Page 47 of a particularly judgmental book I bought suggested that if I rushed to pick up my crying newborns, I was manipulating them into expecting a life of servitude, effectively building a tiny tyrant.

Our GP, a wonderful woman who looked like she hadn't slept since 1998, quite literally laughed in my face when I mentioned this. She drew a vague, squiggly diagram on a Post-it note to explain that newborn brains are essentially soup, entirely incapable of malicious manipulation or establishing bad habits. When they scream, they aren't plotting your downfall; they just think they might genuinely die because they dropped their dummy.

Picking them up, letting them sleep on your chest while you desperately try to reach your tepid tea, and generally acting as a human mattress doesn't spoil them. It just proves to them that the world isn't an empty, terrifying void. Which, if you think about it, is a fairly decent foundation for a future ruler.

The crown jewels of teething

There's a specific, haunted look that parents get when the first tooth starts moving through the jawbone. Your previously pleasant child transforms overnight into a rabid woodland creature that wants to aggressively gnaw on the skirting boards, your car keys, and the fleshy part of your collarbone.

We tried the old remedies. We tried rubbing weird gels on their gums, which mostly just numbed my own index finger. We tried frozen washcloths, which thawed in exactly twelve seconds and then just became a soggy, depressing rag on the carpet. The only thing that seriously intercepted the rage was the Panda Teether. It’s made of food-grade silicone, which is just a fancy way of saying it won't leach horrific chemicals into their bloodstream while they chew on it with the intensity of a starved wolf. The flat shape means Matilda could genuinely hold it without immediately dropping it on her own face, and you can chuck it in the dishwasher when it inevitably gets covered in dog hair.

Abolishing the plastic court jesters

Before the twins arrived, I swore our flat would remain a neutral, aesthetic oasis, a promise that lasted exactly until my aunt arrived with a plastic keyboard that flashed neon strobe lights and played a deeply synthesized version of "Old MacDonald" at a volume that could rattle your fillings.

Babies don't need a mini Las Vegas in their living room. In fact, if you surround a developing brain with overwhelming, chaotic stimuli, they just short-circuit and scream. We eventually boxed up the flashing monstrosities and replaced them with the Rainbow Wooden Play Gym. It just sits there, looking vaguely Scandinavian and quiet. The hanging wooden and fabric animals seriously require the babies to focus and reach, rather than just passively staring at a seizure-inducing light show. It didn't cure their teething or magically make them sleep until 7 AM, but it did allow me to drink an entire cup of coffee in silence without having a synthetic cow moo at me.

As for the royal bath routine, someone on the internet will inevitably tell you to wash your children every single night using organically sourced goat’s milk and a loofah carved from a sea sponge, but our GP told us that chucking them in a couple of inches of plain water twice a week is more than enough to keep the grime off, so we do exactly that and nobody has contracted scurvy yet.

Raising a child is mostly just surviving a series of increasingly absurd negotiations while trying to keep everyone breathing. Before you accidentally buy a £400 cashmere pram blanket that will instantly be ruined by a bodily function, take a deep breath, lower your expectations, and have a look at Kianao’s organic clothing range instead.

Frequently Asked Questions About Royal Parenting

How do you seriously get them to sleep like royalty?
Mostly through blind luck, a terrifying amount of pacing the hallway, and forcing them to exist outside in the daylight so their tiny brains remember what daytime really is. Forget the £200 sleep courses; just buy a decent raincoat and accept that you live in the park now.

Are expensive baby clothes worth it?
If they've a collar, a stupid slogan, or synthetic lace, absolutely not. If it's high-quality organic cotton that has actual stretch and can survive a nuclear fallout in your washing machine without losing its shape, then yes, pay whatever they're asking.

Will holding them too much turn them into tyrants?
Our health visitor confirmed that you can't spoil a newborn, mostly because they lack the cognitive ability to orchestrate a coup. If they're crying, pick them up. It saves everyone’s sanity and prevents you from stress-eating an entire sleeve of biscuits at 4 AM.

What's the deal with bathing them every day?
It's a trap designed to dry out their skin and ruin your evening. Unless they've actively rolled in something hazardous or have pureed broccoli mashed into their actual scalp, twice a week is entirely sufficient.

How do I survive the witching hour without resigning from parenthood?
You just endure it. Between 5 PM and 7 PM, the entire vibe of the house will shift to hostile. We mostly survive by putting them in the pram, pacing the living room, and accepting that the screaming is just a phase that will eventually pass, probably right around the time they learn to talk back.