For the last five years, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have been living a private life in Montecito, the exclusive Santa Barbara enclave where they purchased a home in July 2020. But ever since the duchess started a new Instagram account in January, she has been posting photos from the 7.4-acre estate, including images of her children that would have previously been reserved for a TV special or Netflix docuseries. Over the weekend, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet of Sussex were the stars of a post on Meghan’s account, which featured them in the family’s garden.
“Sunday kind of love…with my little loves,” Meghan captioned the photo, which showed off Archie and Lili’s fiery red hair but not their faces.
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Lili also moonlit as a taste taster in an Instagram Stories video that demonstrated Meghan turning strawberries from the garden into preserves. “What do we think, Lili?” Meghan said in footage that only featured her three-year-old daughter’s hands. Lili replied, “I think it’s beautiful.”
The posts are a sign that Meghan and Harry are comfortable giving the public a sneak peek into their home life in a way that is closer to what they might have done when still living in the palace. When they first became parents in May 2019, Meghan and Harry were working royals, and that meant there was some expectation that their children would also be public figures. But from the beginning, they had plans to do things differently than Kate Middleton and Prince William, who, like Princess Diana and then Prince Charles before them, posed for photos on the steps of the Lindo Wing at St. Mary’s Hospital in London soon after each of their children were born.
In contrast, Harry and Meghan delayed Archie’s birth announcement until after they had returned home from the hospital, bypassing the traditional Royal Rota press information system in favor of a post on their now defunct joint Instagram account, @SussexRoyal. The new member of the Windsor clan was first introduced to the world in a Frogmore Hall photo call that took place two days after his birth, but Meghan and Harry’s bid for some control had already caused a serious controversy among the UK’s tabloid media, which ultimately led the couple to becoming more agitated by press intrusion. Eventually, though, Archie was shown in official photos of his christening, and when Harry and Meghan took a trip to South Africa that fall, he posed with Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
By the time Lilibet was born in June 2021, more than a year had passed since their initial royal exit, and the couple was luxuriating in their privacy. They shut down their Instagram account and were vigilant about protecting their children, even suing a photo agency that sought a photo of Archie in 2020. That said, by announcing Meghan’s second pregnancy with an image from a maternity shoot and sharing their baby’s gender during a high-profile interview with Oprah Winfrey, they were walking a fine line between privacy and publicity that would later be mocked in a South Park parody, which called their recent years a “Worldwide Privacy Tour.”
The first public picture of Lili was a profile view in the family’s 2021 holiday card, and the public didn’t see her whole face until the next summer. In June 2022, photographer Misan Harriman shared a portrait he took at her first birthday party, which was held during Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee weekend. Though the public hasn’t gotten a direct view of her face since, Lili in particular has become an increasingly large part of Meghan’s social media output. When Meghan launched lifestyle company As Ever, Lili was a costar in the brand imagery, seen running alongside her mother in an aerial photograph.
In hindsight, it’s clear that some of the differences between Archie and Lili’s early relationship with the press have to do with their safety. In the years since their royal exit, Harry’s battle with the UK government over his security has revealed exactly how specific and credible the threats against the family were. In 2022, the Metropolitan Police’s former head of counterterrorism told UK network Channel 4 that the threats against the couple from right-wing extremists were “disgusting and very real.”
Over the past few years, Meghan’s relationship with social media has also changed greatly. During her five-year break from Instagram, she and Harry became involved with activism against hate speech and online bullying through their Archewell Foundation. When Meghan rejoined the platform in January, she turned the comments feature off. A source told Vanity Fair that she only returned after discussions with the platform’s parent company, Meta, and was looking forward to connecting directly with her audience.
At last week’s event spotlighting online safety for children, the duchess told reporters that she hoped adults would use social media “to set an example and really put as much good and joy into the world as we can” to counteract some of the negative effects of social media that she has encountered in the course of her charity work. Meghan has helped to fund and promote educational programs to help teenagers have healthier relationships to the digital world, noting that it became a priority because of her own experiences.
There has also been a sea change in how many well-known figures approach public images of their children. The move toward privacy began in the early 2010s, when celebrities like Halle Berry, Jennifer Garner, and Kristen Bell fought for changes in how paparazzi and media outlets treat the children of celebrities. Over the last five years, influencers of all sizes have started to rethink sharing their children’s identities and private information, leading to the now common emoji strategy for covering a child’s face. For TikTok star and podcaster Bobbi Althoff, this started when she realized her two-year-old daughter had already been the target of harassment. Recent scandals around child influencers and family vloggers have started a legal movement encouraging states to pass laws promoting child privacy and the right to be forgotten.
Meghan and Harry’s shifting attitudes about the relationship between their children and the public might just come downstream of their relationship to the royal family. Though the Sussex clan is reportedly not on great terms with the rest of the Windsors, Archie and Lili still received royal titles when their grandfather, King Charles III, ascended the throne in September 2022, and they are currently sixth and seventh in the line of succession and featured on the monarchy’s official website. For Archie, current law states that he would technically need the king’s permission to get married, though that could change in the future. As with their royal cousins, there might eventually be a time when Archie and Lili choose to take on a more public role for themselves.
Of course, some of the changes might have to do with the fact that Harry and Meghan’s kids are slightly older now. For the early years of Lili’s life, Meghan had reduced her public activities significantly, and in interviews, she said motherhood had become her main focus. Over the last year, Meghan has launched a business, a TV show, and a podcast. After a few years away from the spotlight, she seems to be embracing life in the public eye again. When she traveled to New York for an appearance at the Time 100 summit this past Wednesday, Harry accompanied her from their hotel to the conference venue but was happy waiting in the wings while his wife had her moment onstage.
In an interview earlier this year, Meghan said that her kids were getting to the age where she felt like she could include them in her activities and get some of her personality back. “When your children get to a certain age—when you’re not just playing in the sandbox with them but almost playing in your own sandbox again—it’s super joyful,” she told People in March. “As a woman, a mom and a wife, to be able to find yourself again—in a way that was always present but that you maybe couldn’t put as much attention on as you now can when your kids are a little bit older—is a wonderful feeling.”
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