In a new video shared by Scotty’s Little Soldiers, recorded during his visit in May, Prince Harry, 39, spoke with the charity’s founder, Nikki Scott, about the impact of bereavement on children.
Harry, who was only 12 when his mother, Princess Diana, died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, has recently been more open about how her death and the resulting grief affected him.
During the heartfelt discussion, Harry told Nikki: “You convince yourself that the person you’ve lost wants you, or you need to be sad for as long as possible to prove to them that they are missed. But then there’s this realisation of, no they must want me to be happy.”
As Nikki explained how Scotty’s Little Soldiers teaches bereaved military children and young people to celebrate their parent’s life, Harry spoke about the importance of not suppressing emotions, saying: “That’s the hardest thing, especially for kids, I think, which is, ‘I don’t want to talk about it because it will make me sad, but once realising if I do talk about it, and I’m celebrating their life, then actually, things become easier.'”
In a January 2023 interview with Tom Bradby ahead of his memoir “Spare,” Prince Harry revealed that he only cried once following his mother Diana’s tragic death—at her burial. He had previously shared in a 2017 interview with The Telegraph that he “shut down all his emotions” and began to address his grief only when he was 28, through counselling and boxing.
In another emotional moment, Harry appeared visibly moved as Nikki Scott recounted the harrowing experience of telling her five-year-old son Kai that his father, Corporal Lee Scott, had been killed while serving in Afghanistan in 2009.
Nikki told Harry: “It was the worst. How do you tell a 5-year-old this. I took him up and sat him on the bed and I said, ‘Kai, do you remember where Daddy was?’ and he said, ‘yeah, Afghan’, and I said, ‘Something really bad has happened and the baddies (because he used to play Army) have hurt dad and he’s died.'”
Scotty’s Little Soldiers was set up by mother-of-two Nikki in 2010 with its aim to provide long-term support to other bereaved military children and young children.
As Harry shared a hug with Nikki, he told her: “What you’ve done is incredible. It is truly inspirational. I’m really honoured and privileged to be part of Scotty’s now and I really look forward to us doing everything we can to bring in more people, more interest, raise more funds and be able to get the message out there to get more kids the support they so desperately need.”
