Until recently, everyone’s children were waving from the proverbial balcony on social media. You know the tide has turned when even the royals have stopped

Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but when I saw the photo of Princess Beatrice’s new baby, I laughed. Hear me out, though, before you decide I’m a horrible person: I expect baby Athena – lovely name – is perfectly lovely, and having arrived early, as my son did, will have quite a lot of feeding and growing to be getting on with. I say I “expect” she is, because we don’t actually know what Athena looks like. In the photograph her parents released of her, her entire face is hidden by her own raised sleeve in a Garbo-esque plea of “I want to be alone”.

So yes, I did laugh, but I also thought, well, fair play. I’m not one of those members of the British public who feels entitled to information about the royals, or photographs of their offspring. Athena is, as far as I’m concerned, entitled to her privacy and good on her parents for trying to maintain that, because, after all, she is too small to give her own consent.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist