Prince William the part of parenting he finds 'quite difficult': 'Can't fix everything'

Prince William and his wife Catherine, the Princess of Wales, have made no secret of the fact their children come first – often putting their needs ahead of their royal duties.

They have also spoken about how they choose to handle difficult situations with their children honestly, including Catherine's cancer diagnosis.

Now William has admitted he sometimes struggles with one aspect of raising his three children George, 12, Charlotte, 10, and Louis, seven, during an overnight radio interview tackling the subject of mental health.

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The Prince of Wales was appearing on BBC Radio 1 show Life Hacks as part of an all-male panel talking about mental health when host Greg James asked if he noticed his children "talk openly about their feelings, their day, how they were feeling about a certain thing".

"Yes, sometimes too much," William said with a laugh, before adding, "I get all the details, which I love, you know, it's amazing."

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"And being able to understand it, have time with it, decipher it, sometimes you feel a sense you need to fix it for everyone, and that I find quite difficult.

"I have to remind myself, 'You don't need to fix everything, but you need to listen', and it's important just to be OK with those feelings and those comments."

William also said it was important for the next generation to understand "emotions are OK".

"You're going to have uncomfortable emotions and you're going to have really great emotions [and] there's a huge spectrum in between," he said.

"I think my understanding, learning about mental health through my journey, has been about seeing how the previous generations try and understand why they didn't talk about it.

"So for me to understand where we are now, I need to understand where we've been."

William also touched on how previous generations handled traumatic events.

"I think the situation with the world wars, generations before us couldn't talk about their emotions," he said.

"They saw and they went through some really horrendous things that no matter how much you try and talk about it, it wouldn't have really helped anyone.

"And so they, as a generation, decided, probably not deliberately, but they just kept to themselves.

"They then hand that mantle on to the next generation, again not deliberately, but by sort of, that's all they knew.

"We have to break that cycle [because] you have to talk about your emotions.

"You can't just bottle them up and pretend they don't exist. That's where it all goes wrong."

William said while "we've got a long way to go in this journey of mental health", it was "really crucial we know where we've come from because that is such important growth for all of us to get our heads around where we're trying to head to".

Certainly, this generational change is evident in William's own family. His father, King Charles, had a famously complicated relationship with his father, Prince Philip.

While King Charles was seen to be more sensitive, he reportedly struggled to break the shackles of his own upbringing when fathering his sons, William and Harry.

Much has been written about how the royal family handled the death of Prince William and Harry's mother, Princess Diana, in 1997.

William, then 15, and Harry, 12, were staying at Balmoral, Scotland, when they were told their mother had died, and were encouraged to go out shooting on the estate.

Days later, they took part in a walkabout in London to view the floral tributes and cards left for their mother, then walked behind her coffin during a procession to her funeral – all horrifying to imagine today.

William addressed his mother's death in the 2017 documentary, Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy.

"There's nothing like it in the world," William said.

"There really isn't. It's like an earthquake has just run through the house and through your life and everything.

"Your mind is completely split. And it took me a while for it to actually sink in."

During an interview in November 2025 to promote the Earthshot Prize he created, William said he and Catherine "choose to communicate a lot more with our children".

"Sometimes you feel you're oversharing with the children", he said.

"But most of the time, hiding stuff from them doesn't work, and so explaining how they feel, why that's happening, giving them other viewpoints as to why they might be feeling like they are, sometimes helps give them a bigger picture, and they can relax more into it rather than being really anxious about 'what are you hiding from me?'" he said.

"There's a lot more questions when there's no answers.

"But it's always a balancing act. How much do I say? What do I say? When do I say it? There's no manual for being a parent, you've just got to go with it."

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