This morning, on International Day of the Girl, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry joined Malala Yousafzai in a chat about global girls' education, a cause to which Yousafzai has dedicated her
life. In the 13-minute conversation, the 23-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner kept the focus on childhood, education, and access to education—especially now in the age of COVID-19.
At the end of the call, though, Malala took things in a more personal direction and asked Meghan and Harry how they've been spending their time during quarantine. Of course, their answer included mention of the son, Archie.
At first they joked that most of their time during the pandemic has been spent "on Zoom calls" (probably not an exaggeration). "But outside of that with our little one," Meghan said. "We were both there for his first steps, his first run, his first fall, his first everything," Harry followed up.
Meghan touched on how, in the past, she and Harry might not have been there for Archie's big milestones: "And it's just fantastic, because I think in so many ways we are fortunate to be able to have this time to watch him grow, and in the absence of COVID, we would be traveling and working more externally, and we'd miss a lot of those moments," she said. "So I think it's been a lot of good family time."
"These are really special moments, but at the same time, as Meghan says, we've been working really, really hard, because we completely understand and get how challenging this is for absolutely everyone. And I think the longer it goes on for, the more it's gonna be felt, especially from a mental-health aspect. So this is a really unifying moment to bring everybody together and just acknowledge what everyone has been through."
Earlier in the call, Malala asked Meghan about why she chose girls education as her philanthropic focus. "Similar to you, I think you see something that is so critical to be addressed and is so critical to be fixed, and that by fixing that one thing, you end up fixing multiple problems. And so you know, what I had realized very early on was that when women had a seat at the table, conversations in terms of policy change, conversations in terms of legislation, certainly in terms of just the dynamics of the community, are all shifted."
Watch the full conversation here:
During a World Mental Health Day conversation yesterday with the hosts of the podcast Teenager Therapy, Meghan shared a personal detail about her own mental health and what it felt like to be subject to internet gossip last year: "I'm told that in 2019 I was the most trolled person in the entire world—male or female. Now, eight months of that I wasn't even visible. I was on maternity leave or with a baby but was able to just be manufactured and churned out. It's almost unsurvivable. That's so big you can't even think of what that feels like, because I don't care if you're 15 or you're 25, if people are saying things about you that aren't true, what that does to your mental and emotional health is so damaging."