The OP on this thread is unfair, inaccurate and actually really quite racist too.
The comments were made at the steering group of a helpline being set up for parents. The members of the steering group are experts, volunteers and parents. Kate was pictured with some of the parents members of the steering group. All the parents she was photographed with were women of colour. Nowhere have these women been described as ‘a group of women who are facing huge financial, emotional and physical problems in their lives daily’. The helpline is not even aimed at that group. I assume that the OP is just making an automatic assumption that women from ethnic minorities are going to be ‘women who are facing huge financial, emotional and physical problems in their lives daily’, which is a really fucking racist assumption.
Given that these women are able to sacrifice the time and money to take part and have been judged capable of being able to make meaningful contributions to the group, it’s not really very likely that they’re women living in day to day crisis mode. In fact some or all of the women pictured may actually have been the advising volunteers who are all parents too. Not necessarily parents facing problems- again, the assumption they must be the women with problems is a bit racist.
What Kate said was completely appropriate for the project. It’s a confidential helpline open to absolutely any parent or carer. It’s not particularly aimed at parents facing huge or catastrophic problems, in fact those parents already have help they can access through a number of sources. The whole point of it being open to everybody is that you don’t need to have awful problems to get in touch. The example they gave were of a parent struggling with a babies sleep, something that is an issue for many parents regardless of wealth or social background.
It’s more aimed at the sort of problems that wouldn’t normally qualify parents for external support. In fact an awful lot of the parenting questions that we see day in, day out on MN, but the answers come from someone trained with access to reliable and up to date information rather than just some random on the internet.
Given that the OP has just jumped to the conclusion that the helpline must only be for the really disadvantaged, it shows how appropriate what Kate said was for this particular project. She was emphasising that parenting is tough for everyone and everybody could do with a little help sometimes and that it shouldn’t be stigmatised, which is very helpful for a project which is trying to offer support to ordinary parents with everyday worries and issues. The fact the OP has jumped right in with two feet, stigmatising the people who use it and making horrible assumptions about them, shows exactly why it’s probably difficult for the charity to get this message across and why Kate tried to emphasise it and make parents feel there is no shame in needing support.
She wasn’t referring to her own problems or how hard she finds it. She was referring to people in general. Yes she has a live in nanny, but nannies aren’t on duty 24/7 and she does duties at unsociable hours and travels for them so the nanny is likely to be mainly working when she’s not there and even royals don’t have their children entirely raised by nannies anymore. Her children don’t care if she’s the Duchess of Cambridge so she’s still going to have to cope with tantrums, difficult phases, squabbling siblings just like everybody else and it won’t be much easier for her than it is for the rest of us.
This story has been twisted once by the Sun, then twisted again by the OP making huge racist and inaccurate assumptions about the people involved. Just goes to show that lies can be half way around the world before the truth even has it’s shoes on.