It’s a delightful photograph of a smiling toddler reaching out to touch her father’s face.
And it’s all the more notable as the adorable baby is none other than the Princess of Wales.
Kate shared the picture of herself with her father Michael Middleton yesterday to promote her new campaign highlighting the importance of early childhood.
The snap was taken by the Princess’s mother, Carole, and Kate captioned it: ‘With Dad, by Mum’, adding: ‘Faces are a baby’s best toy.’
She urged others to follow her example by sharing their own childhood photos online, and stars including Victoria Beckham, Harry Kane and Jamie Oliver obliged – with the TV chef posting an image of himself in 1970s brown trousers and strap-on rollerskates.
Kate shared the picture of herself with her father Michael Middleton yesterday to promote her new campaign
The move tops a week of publicity to launch the Princess’ Shaping Us campaign to ‘raise awareness of the vital role our early years play in shaping the rest of our lives’.
Kate wrote: This weekend, we’d love for you all to spend time with your friends, families, colleagues and communities talking about your early childhoods and how they’ve shaped your lives. I hope you’ll also consider joining me in sharing a picture of yourselves before your fifth birthday to help with those conversations and to share some smiles and memories too.’
To launch her campaign the Princess charmed youngsters at an East London primary school, spoke to students in Leeds and released an animated ‘claymation’ video of a little girl growing from birth to the age of five.
A spokesman for the Princess, who is promoting the work of the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, described the cause as ‘her life’s work’, adding that the campaign was designed to look at how our early years of life ‘mould’ us into the adults we become.
And talking of Royal toddlers, which of these can you name? (Find the answers at the bottom of the page)
1.
Barack Obama joked this Prince ‘broke protocol’ for meeting him in a bathrobe
2.
Time to perfect that regal pose… for one day it’ll be on the banknotes!
3.
Practising the royal wave, even if her 2020 wedding would not be in public
4.
Not Princess Charlotte, but her double – and Charles and Diana’s bridesmaid
5.
The future ‘hardest-working Royal’ looks very determined, even at this early age
6.
This youngster has a distinguished name – literally – as well as sharing it with a month
7.
Has this young Prince inherited his mother’s famous sense of fashion?
8.
Sleeping on the job? Let’s hope he doesn’t do that in an Abbey in May
9.
In the great outdoors, years before her husband would enter the jungle
10.
An early picture of the girl destined to be ‘the world’s most photographed woman’
