Princess Anne Frets for Children

Princess Anne, daughter of a reigning monarch, says she wishes her children had better role models.

“I look around and wonder what sort of examples they have to look up to now,” the daughter of Queen Elizabeth II told a BBC radio interviewer today. “That worries me. I don’t think there are very many. . . . I think their elder generation is to blame for that.”

Anne, 39, who separated from her husband, Capt. Mark Phillips, in August, said she is not very strict with her 12-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter.

“I don’t go along with the ‘seen and not heard.’ It would be very nice but I think it’s rather an impractical suggestion really,” said the princess.

She said her travels on behalf of the Save the Children fund, of which she is president, have made her more concerned about what she sees at home.

“You find if you go to any number of countries where the small rural communities have very strict codes of behavior you don’t find much thieving and pilfering, and murder is almost unheard of,” the princess said.