Parenting

Welcome to parenthood, Meghan and Harry – you’ll never get a good night’s sleep again | Adrian Chiles


The Duke of Cambridge welcomed his brother to “the sleep-deprivation society that is parenting” this week. That is sweet, obviously. Most parents have been members of that society. But do we believe that he or his brother, or indeed the mothers of their children, will have struggled with this like the rest of us?

I ask the question because I really don’t know the answer, and neither do I know what honest answer I’d want to hear. Are we supposed to imagine that the three members of the Sussex family will now be rugged up in the same room, with the parents leaping out of bed at every snuffle from their bairn?

And why would they? In their shoes, I’m pretty sure I’d soon give in to the temptation of having the baby in the next room with a paediatrician and nurse and nanny in attendance, as well as a harpist to gently get the seventh in line to the throne back off to sleep.

But no kind of nocturnal support squad will solve the central challenge that dawned on me when my eldest was a few days old. Listening worriedly (for no reason) to her breathing, I was seized with panic, wondering if I would ever sleep properly again. Not that night, nor the next night, or in five months’ or five years’ time, or 18 years hence when she would be backpacking around somewhere or other.

I put this to a colleague of mine at the time on BBC Radio 5 Live, Peter Allen, a father of three grownup kids. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “You’ll never really get a good night’s sleep again.” And now, with my little baby away studying, out half the night in another city, doing who knows what with who knows whom, I know for sure he was right. Maybe I should hire a harpist.



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