( CNN ) -- At long last , the royal baby has arrived ! The queen can finally depart for her summer holiday at Balmoral . The paparazzi who have been littering the streets in front of St. Mary 's Hospital can now train their long lenses on a topless ( albeit nursing ) mother . To Kate and William , I pass on the most consoling words I received when my daughter was born : The first month of parenthood is n't for the faint-hearted . Everyone 's got advice for new parents . The French -- we are told -- raise happier and better-behaved children , thanks to their self-assured authority and bans on snacking . Tiger moms , so the legend goes , breed successful children because of rigorous discipline and unflinchingly high standards . Gwyneth Paltrow 's children prosper because they are deprived of carbohydrates . But in a clamorous field of conflicting advice-givers , the members of Britain 's royal family are notable no-shows . While many have an opinion about how the new royal baby should be brought up -- nanny or no nanny , Charles and Camilla or the Middletons holding grandparently sway -- there is no volley answering back from the Palace . Little wonder , since a Royal Guide to Parenting sounds like a Monty Python skit , with the dotty royal ancestors alternately misplacing their progeny and browbeating them for breaches of arcane infant protocol . 'Wicked ' author : Royal baby stands for hope . It 's not that royal parents lack a plan . Kate and Prince William reportedly want a `` normal '' childhood for their offspring . Prince William 's mother , Diana , said the same thing . For Diana , that meant unscheduled playtimes , the occasional meal at McDonald 's , nursery school with other children . But if a trip for the royal heirs to Disney World was a novelty , the longing for ordinariness -- or seeming ordinariness -- is in fact a much older aspiration . It was Prince William 's great-great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria and her German consort , Prince Albert , who recognized the adulation that might be inspired by a royal family ( the term was Albert 's own coinage ) cast in the mold of middle-class virtues . Unlike her dissipated uncles , Victoria and her family would be paragons of bourgeois domesticity . Albert was present at the birth of his children . The education of Bertie , their second-born son and heir , was approached with the utmost seriousness . Distrustful of the lax and inattentive royal parents of the past , Albert elected to superintend every detail of Bertie 's upbringing himself . Opinion : Why I would n't want to be royal baby . Still , all of this parental care came , as Jane Ridley 's fascinating new biography of Edward VII reveals , at a high price . Bertie could never live up to his parents ' expectations of him . He was rebellious , a slow learner and -- or so his father feared -- marked by the congenital weaknesses in Victoria 's line . In the hope of instilling regular habits , Albert spied on his son constantly . Both of his parents issued a constant stream of corrections , Tiger Mothers before the fact . `` I had no boyhood , '' Bertie later lamented . From Victoria and Albert onwards , contemporary claims to normality and ordinariness jostle up against retrospective assessments of secrecy and isolation . Was Charles ' father , Prince Philip , really doing a `` splendidly modern job on the upbringing of his son , '' as the Daily Mirror reported when Charles was 13 : `` No effete , out-dated Eton , with its tailcoats , fancy waistcoats , slender watch chains and high-pitched accents '' ? Or was young Prince Charles , as is now often suggested , the hapless victim of distant parents who subjected him to an education unsuited to his personality ? Opinion : Baby helps make a monarchy better . As Prince Albert presciently recognized , family life does provide common ground , even a point of identification and sympathy , between royals and their subjects . While few live in a castle , the vast majority of us have parents of some sort . But contrary to Albert 's fond hopes , the royal family has proved itself most normal in the late 20th century not by exemplifying middle-class virtues but by enacting the same fallout from the sexual revolution as most other Western families : adultery , divorce , confession and intergenerational conflict . That sort of normality , however , does n't endear you to taxpayers . For extraordinary people to make themselves ordinary is a conjuring act , one that requires a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of their audience . It 's role-playing on our part as well as theirs . So , Kate and William : We wish you many perfectly ordinary sleepless nights , changing diapers and worrying over test scores . But we 'll only know you 're really normal when you tell the rest of us how to raise a baby -- and , on the basis of results achieved , some are willing to listen . The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Deborah Cohen .
The Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy on Monday . Deborah Cohen : Everyone 's got advice for new parents , but the royal family has been mum . She says Kate and Prince William reportedly want a `` normal '' childhood for their child . Cohen : For extraordinary people to make themselves ordinary is a conjuring act .