While Prince Harry and Meghan Markle‘s move to the U.S. coincided with the global coronavirus pandemic and has forced them to quarantine at home, the couple admitted in a video interview on Sunday, October 11, that the time has allowed them to savor precious moments with their son, Archie, and be there for all of his milestones.
The royal couple spoke with Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai from a sofa in their Santa Barbara, California, home to commemorate International Day of the Girl and talk about the importance of education to empower young women around the world.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex spoke about their own experiences at school and Meghan, 39, who has championed the importance of girls’ education for years, shared her priorities for the pair’s 17-month-old son.
“To be able to raise our son in a way where everything about his nourishment is in terms of educational substance, and how you can learn and how you can grow. You know, having the privilege of being able to go to school is something that, I think, oftentimes is taken for granted,” she said.
When Yousafzai, 23, asked the pair about how they have been spending time in lockdown amid the pandemic, Harry, 36, said that they’ve been “on Zoom” and doing lots of conference calls, but the couple admitted that being at home has allowed them to spend more time together as a family over the past few months.
“We were both there for his first steps,” Harry said of Archie. “His first run, his first fall, his first everything.”
“And it’s just fantastic, because I think in so many ways we are fortunate to be able to have this time to watch him grow, and in the absence of COVID, we would be traveling and working more externally,” Meghan added. “And we’d miss a lot of those moments. So it’s been a lot of good family time.”
“Those are really special moments but at the same time, as Meghan says we’ve been working really, really hard and completely understand and get how challenging this is for absolutely everyone,” Harry added. “And I think the longer it goes on for, the more it’s going to be felt especially from a mental health aspect.”
He concluded, “This is a really unifying moment to bring everybody together and acknowledge what everyone has been through. This traumatic experience, wherever you are in the world. For us, the work continues … we continue to throw our weight behind those things that we think are really important.”
