Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are 'grateful' that Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet are too young for social media
On Wednesday, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle unveiled an installation in New York City.
The installation highlighted the dangers of social media for children.
Harry said at the event that he and Meghan are glad their kids are still too young for social media.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are already considering how social media could impact their children.
On Wednesday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Archewell Foundation Parents' Network revealed The Lost Screen Memorial in New York City.
Part of the foundation's "No Child Lost to Social Media" campaign, the installation consisted of 50 art pieces designed to look like large cellphones. Each featured a lockscreen photo of a child who died due to social media-related harms.
As part of the unveiling, Harry, 40, and Meghan, 43, attended a private vigil with the parents of the children depicted in the display.
During the event, which Business Insider attended, the Duke and Duchess also shared their thoughts on the dangers of social media — and how it might impact their children.
The Archewell Foundation officially formed The Parents' Network in August 2024 after first testing it in 2023. Today, the network supports parents who lost children due to social media-related harms, offering them resources and a place to connect with families with similar experiences.
The Lost Screen Memorial is a culmination of that work, both in that it created a physical representation of those who died and because it brought many members of the network together in person for the first time. The installation will only be up in New York for 24 hours, though it is also available to view online.
Amy Neville, whose son Alexander Neville died in 2020 of a fentanyl overdose, described The Parents' Network as "an amazing home" for parents like her at the vigil.
"When this type of thing happens in your life, you feel like you're alone. You feel like you're an enigma," Neville said at the event. "We can come into this space and be around these families and just feel normal."
"It's been a place for us to be able to recharge," Todd Minor said of The Parents' Network's role in his and his wife Mia's life after their son Matthew died.
"We've been advocating, and year after year trying to get bills passed at the state and federal level," he said. "We're able to go to The Parents' Network to recharge and just share. It's just an additional family to us."
Harry and Meghan have been active in The Parents' Network since its inception, and they greeted many of the families at the vigil on Wednesday as old friends.
Several parents who attended told BI that it was gratifying how knowledgeable the couple is about the dangers of social media.
"It's nice to know that somebody who has maybe some influence is actually paying attention and is going out there," Neville said of the duke and duchess.
Researchers are still studying how social media harms youth and how to address it. In June 2024, the surgeon general proposed putting government warning labels on the platforms.
Harry and Meghan have seen the darker sides of social media firsthand, becoming the targets of coordinated harassment during their time as senior royals. Harry has also said that online bullying and the amplification of harassment from UK tabloids contributed to his and Meghan's decision to step back from the monarchy in 2020.
They stopped using their joint Instagram account the same year and have been largely absent from social media since then.
"Life is better off of social media," Harry said while speaking to BI and other outlets on Wednesday. He added that he and Meghan are glad their children, Prince Archie, 5, and Princess Lilibet, 3, haven't aged into social media yet.
"We're just grateful that our kids are too young to be on social media," he said.
However, the prince also said he realizes that, given our digital world, that likely won't always be the case.
"The easiest thing to say is to keep your kids away from social media," he said. "The sad reality is that the kids that aren't on social media normally get bullied at school because they can't be part of the same conversations as everybody else."
Harry said he hopes social-media companies will do more to make their platforms safe for children.
"While social-media companies claim to be taking action, most still withhold critical data from grieving parents — data that could provide answers and accountability," Harry said. "This is a growing crisis. Social media is quietly taking our children, and those with the power to make change are failing to act."
Meghan, who also spoke at the Time100 Summit on Wednesday, returned to Instagram in January before launching her company, As Ever, and her Netflix show, "With Love, Meghan." She made her first post on New Year's Day, sharing a video of herself running on the beach.
The duchess has mostly posted about her business endeavors on her new page and doesn't allow comments on her posts, limiting trolls' access to her content.
Meghan shares small snippets of her personal life, including photos with Harry and videos of her cooking at home with her kids. However, she keeps Archie and Lilibet's faces off her page, highlighting her and Harry's focus on their children's privacy.
"I think for those who do choose to be online and to be in social media as adults that we get to set the example and really put as much good and joy into the world as we can," Meghan said on Wednesday.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
Forget 'biological age' tests — longevity experts are using an $800 under-the-radar blood test to measure aging in real-time
Doctors and scientists are using a blood plasma test to study longevity. The test measures proteins and can tell you about your organ health. This field of proteomics could one day help detect diseases like cancer before they start. Should you have that second cup of coffee? How about a little wine with dinner? And, is yogurt really your superfood? Scientists are getting closer to offering consumers a blood test that could help people make daily decisions about how to eat, drink, and sleep that are more perfectly tailored to their unique biology. The forthcoming tests could also help shape what are arguably far more important health decisions, assessing whether your brain is aging too fast, if your kidneys are OK, or if that supplement or drug you're taking is actually doing any good. It's called an organ age test, more officially (and scientifically) known as "proteomics" — and it's the next hot " biological age" marker that researchers are arguing could be better than all the rest. "If I could just get one clock right now, I'd want to get that clock, and I'd like to see it clinically available in older adults," cardiologist Eric Topol, author of the recent bestseller "Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity," told Business Insider. Topol said armed with organ age test results, people could become more proactive stewards of their own health, before it's too late. "When we have all these layers of data, it's a whole new day for preventing the disease," Topol said. "You see the relationship with women's hormones. You see the relationship with food and alcohol. You don't ever get that with genes." A test like this isn't available to consumers just yet, but it's already being used by researchers at elite universities and high-end longevity clinics. They hope it can become a tool any doctor could use to assess patient health in the next few years. A startup called Vero, which was spun out of some foundational proteomics research at Stanford University, is hoping to beta test a proteomics product for consumers this year. "Knowing your oldest organ isn't the point; changing the trajectory is," Vero co-founder and CEO Paul Coletta told a crowd gathered at the Near Future Summit in Malibu, California, last month. Coletta told Business Insider Vero's not interested in doing "wealthcare." The company plans to make its test available to consumers for around $200 a pop, at scale. Their draw only requires one vial of blood. Why measuring proteins could be the key to better personalized medicine The big promise of proteomics is that it could be a more precise real-time tool for tracking important but subtle changes that emerge inside each of us as we age. Genetic testing can measure how our bodies are built, spotting vulnerabilities in a person's DNA that might predispose them to health issues. Standard clinical measurements like a person's weight, blood pressure, or cholesterol readings are a useful proxy for potential health issues. Then there are the increasingly popular "biological age" tests available to consumers at home. Most of those look at "epigenetic changes" — how environmental factors affect our gene expression. Proteomics does something different and new. It measures the product that our bodies make based on all those genetic and environmental inputs: proteins. It offers a live assessment of how your body is running, not just how it's programmed. If validated in the next few years, these tests could become key in early disease detection and prevention. They could help influence all kinds of medical decisions, from big ones like "What drugs should I take?" to little ones like "How does my body respond to caffeine or alcohol?" Elite longevity clinics already use proteomics Some high-end longevity clinics are already forging ahead using proteomics to guide clinical recommendations, albeit cautiously. Dr. Evelyne Bischof, a longevity physician who treats patients worldwide, said she uses proteomic information to guide some of the lifestyle interventions she recommends to her patients. She may suggest a more polyphenol-rich diet to someone who seems to have high inflammation and neuroinflammation based on proteomic test results, or may even suggest they do a little more cognitive training, based on what proteomics says about how their brain is aging. Dr. Andrea Maier, a professor of medicine and functional aging at the National University of Singapore, told BI she uses this measurement all the time in her longevity clinics. For her, it's just a research tool, but if the results of her ongoing studies are decent, she hopes to be able to use it clinically in a few years' time. "We want to know what kind of 'ageotype' a person is, so what type of aging personality are you, not from a mental perspective, but from a physical perspective," Maier said. "It's really discovery at this moment in time, and at the edge of being clinically meaningful." "Once we have that validated tool, we will just add it to our routine testing and we can just tick the box and say, 'I also want to know if this person is a cardiac ager, or a brain ager, or a muscle ager' because now we have a sensitive parameter — protein — which can be added," Maier said. The two big-name proteomics tests are Olink and SOMAscan. For now, their high-end screening costs around $400-$800 per patient. "I'm losing lots of money at the moment because of proteomics for clinical research!" Maier said. Proteomics could soon help predict who's most likely to get certain cancers, fast-tracking both prevention and treatment Top aging researchers at Stanford and Harvard are pushing the field forward, racing to publish more novel insights about the human proteome. The latest findings from Harvard aging researcher Vadim Gladyshev's lab, published earlier this year, suggest that as we age, each person may even stand to benefit from a slightly different antiaging grocery list. To research this idea, Gladyshev looked at proteins in the blood of more than 50,000 people in the UK, all participants in the UK Biobank who are being regularly tested and studied to learn more about their long-term health. He tracked their daily habits and self-reported routines like diet, occupation, and prescriptions, comparing those details to how each patient's organs were aging. He discovered some surprising connections. Yogurt eating, generally speaking, tended to be associated with better intestinal aging but had relatively no benefit to the arteries. White wine drinking, on the other hand, seemed to potentially confer some small benefit to the arteries while wreaking havoc on the gut. "The main point is that people age in different ways in different organs, and therefore we need to find personalized interventions that would fit that particular person," Gladyshev told BI. "Through measuring proteins, you assess the age of different organs and you say, 'OK, this person is old in this artery.'" For now, there's too much noise in the data to do more. Dr. Pal Pacher, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism who studies organ aging and injuries, told BI that proteomics is simply not ready for clinical use yet. There's just too much noise in the data. But he imagines a future where a more sophisticated protein clock could help link up which people may be most vulnerable to diseases like early cancer, kidney disease, and more. (A California-based proteomics company called Seer announced last weekend that it is partnering with Korea University to study whether proteomics can help more quickly diagnose cancer in young people in their 20s and 30s.) "How beautiful could it be in the future?" Maier said. "Instead of three hours of clinical investigation, I would have a tool which guides me much, much better, with more validity towards interventions."
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Carrying My New Husband Across the Threshold
It seemed a romantic beginning, carrying my new husband across the threshold of our apartment for the first time since getting married. In reality, paramedics carried Harry, his frail frame strapped into an emergency chair. I trailed behind them on four flights of our walk-up, holding his oxygen tank, its plastic tubing connecting us that April afternoon. It would be among the last times I saw my husband alive. In the space of a month, I was engaged, married and widowed to Harry, who had been my friend and roommate for nearly 25 years. Just as surreal, our wedding took place at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx the day before, on Easter Sunday 2022. Harry, whose birth name was Wing-Ho Chow, my reluctant husband who wanted to keep our marriage secret, had just exercised spousal privilege, releasing himself into my care despite knowing I was flying back that day to Purdue University where I was teaching and pursuing a Ph.D. The months before his death were exhausting as I traveled every few days between Indiana and New York. Hospital weddings may be a common trope in movies and TV, but they are exceedingly rare. Only one nurse on Harry's floor could recall witnessing one. Such is their rarity that the head nurse told me that the hospital wanted to issue a news release about our nuptials, something Harry adamantly refused. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Prince Harry Didn't Mean to ‘Attack' Royal Family With Bombshell BBC Interview, Biographer Says
Prince Harry apparently didn't mean any harm with his bombshell BBC interview — at least, according to a royal expert. 'It wasn't meant to be an attack, but it would be seen as one,' royal biographer Valentine Low told People in an interview published on Tuesday, June 3, regarding last month's interview. Harry, 40, offered a public plea to his father, King Charles III, asking for a reconciliation with his family during the May 2 interview. The Duke of Sussex claimed that his father 'won't speak to me' during the chat. (The interview came after Harry lost the appeal in his battle for government-funded security in the U.K.) 'I would love reconciliation with my family. There's no point in continuing to fight anymore,' Harry also said at the time. 'Life is precious. I don't know how much longer my father has.' Royal Family Reportedly Had 'Brief' Heads-Up About Prince Harry's Bombshell Interview Low told People that Harry's comments weren't a positive step toward the possibility of a future reconciliation with his father or brother, Prince William. 'It makes Charles reaching out even harder,' the Power and the Palace author added, noting that 'there is not a good angel' telling Charles to 'be a good dad and make the first move.' A separate royal expert shared a similar sentiment, telling Us Weekly exclusively last month that Charles, 76, is unlikely to reach out to Harry. 'The King is only hewing to a long-standing royal practice of not dignifying something by commenting on it. The Palace does not want to give oxygen to Harry's remarks,' royal expert Christopher Andersen said. 'King Charles has a lot on his plate as it is — there is no upside to his getting into a public quarrel with his son.' Prince William Is 'Done With Harry,' Will Not Publicly Respond to Brother's Comments, Source Says Fellow royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams also told Us that Harry's comments regarding Charles' health 'are unlikely to have gone down well' within the family. (Charles was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in February 2024.) 'If Harry really wants to reconcile with his family, he has an odd way of showing it,' Andersen also told Us. 'He slams his father for interfering in the trial, then says the Palace rigged the outcome, then accuses the Royal Family of not caring about the safety of his wife and children, and winds up declaring that for now he can't foresee any scenario in which he would take his family to the U.K.,' Andersen continued. 'Harry delivered the coup de grace when he said he wanted to bury the hatchet with his father because he doesn't know how much time the King has left to live.'
