Many parents have learned firsthand that gender disappointment can be a real thing. Even if it only lasts a minute, it can be hard to adjust to having a baby boy or girl if we were so sure it would be the opposite. It stands to reason that not even members of the royal family would be immune to this kind of disappointment, but apparently, it wasn’t exactly fleeting for King Charles (then a prince) when his second child, Prince Harry was born. According to Princess Diana herself, her family simply wasn’t having it.
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It’s no secret that Charles was hoping for a daughter.
Because Prince William was born first, Charles already had a son, so when Princess Diana was pregnant with her second child, he was gunning for it to be a girl.
In interviews that were recorded for Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography Diana: Her True Story, Diana said she knew while she was pregnant that she was having a boy but didn’t tell Charles, knowing he was so convinced it would be a girl.
Charles didn’t try to hide his feelings when Harry was born.
When he gathered with Diana’s family, the Spencers, he got an unexpected reaction when he spoke openly about his disappointment, as Diana said in the tapes.
“At Harry’s christening, Charles went up to Mummy and said ‘we’re so disappointed, we wanted a girl’ and Mummy snapped his head off and said ‘you should realize you are lucky to have a child that’s normal,’” Diana said.
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