EARLY YEARS CHAMPION THE PRINCESS OF WALES IS ‘HONOURED’ TO MEET YOUNG PEOPLE AND CARERS
REPORT: EMILY NASH
S he has made it her mission to give all children the best possible start in life and the Princess of Wales showed her natural affinity with little ones on a play date with toddlers last week.
Kate sat on the floor with youngsters and pushed toy cars around as she chatted to “kinship carers”, who are raising children that are not their own.
The future Queen, in a pink Alexander McQueen suit and white heels, was at the Saint Pancras Community Association in Camden, North London, where she joined a group session run by the charity Kinship, which supports many of the more than 162,000 children being raised in kinship care in the UK.
Chatting to the carers about how they are raising the child of a relative or friend, she asked: “Do they [the children] find it hard amongst their peers at school? Do they feel different?” Maxine, a project worker, said: “It’s important [for the children] to know who they are and where they have come from.
“When certain conversations come up at home about identity, we have honest conversations. And the support carers receive from these kinds of groups is so stabilising for them.”
One carer said: “The more awareness there is around kinship care, the better it will be. We are forgotten. Everyone knows what a foster carer is or adoptive parents, but not what we are.”
Kate was joined by the rapper Professor Green – real name Stephen Manderson – and his grandmother “Nanny Pat”, who raised him after his mother gave birth to him aged 16.
THE PRINCESS AND THE PROFESSOR
“Lovely to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you,” Kate said to Pat, who became Stephen’s guardian when he was three.
He said: “The first time I heard about Kinship I rang my nan and told her: ‘Did you know you were a kinship carer?’ and she was like: ‘What, no?’”
“I don’t think a lot of people in this situation have heard of this term,” said the Princess.
Stephen, who now has a two-year-old son, is a Shaping Us champion, supporting the Princess’s early years campaign, which he described as “brilliant”. He said: “She really is passionate about this; she actively cares about it. This is something she has really immersed herself in. You only have to look at the people supporting the campaign to see how serious this is.
“Bringing those people together has been amazing. All of our collective forces can make a change. She’s making really good use of her position to facilitate change.”
Earlier, the Princess told yo
