There is something that Princess Kate has adopted from the late Princess Diana, almost without anyone asking her to. That belief is the conviction that being the son of a prince doesn’t have to mean growing up in a bubble.
Darren McGrady, a chef who worked for Diana from 1993 to 1997, makes this abundantly clear when he talks about what he sees in Kate today with her own children. The similarity is no coincidence. From clothing to upbringing, the Princess of Wales has shaped much of her parenting style by looking to her mother-in-law.
The Saturday ritual that Diana established and that Kate has made her own
McGrady says that Diana had a set routine with William and Harry. Every Saturday night, she would sit with them in front of the TV, and they would have fast food for dinner together—pizza, hamburgers, fried chicken. The housekeeper always recommended roast chicken and vegetables, but Diana would purposely break that rule.
“It was an unusual whim, but it was also Diana’s way of showing them that they were normal kids,” the chef explains. He adds that today, “you can see a lot of that in Kate with her own children.”
In fact, Kate and William make homemade pizzas with George and Charlotte. In an interview in 2018, Kate herself said that she loves making the dough with them “because they like to get their hands dirty.”
The normalcy that Kate wants for her children isn’t just about fast food on weekends. There are also clear limits on technology use.
George, Charlotte, and Louis have a fairly strict screen time schedule, a practice that Kate has advocated for in a personal essay titled “The Power of Human Connection in a Distracted World.”
In that essay, she wrote that we are raising a generation that is more connected than ever but, at the same time, more isolated and less equipped to build warm relationships.
McGrady, who also spoke about Diana in an interview with People in 2025, said that if she were alive, she would be very proud of William and the way he is carrying out his royal responsibilities.
That opinion is even more valuable coming from someone who experienced those Happy Meal Saturdays from inside the kitchen.