Members of the Honourable Artillery Company fire a salute to mark the birth of Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge's son at the Tower of London on Tuesday, July 23. The news was placed in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace in London on July 22. Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to the boy at 4:24 p.m. July 22. He weighed 8 pounds, 6 ounces. A name has not been announced for the child, who is third in line to the British throne. 
People gather outside Buckingham Palace in London to read the notice announcing the birth of the royal baby on July 23. 
A man reads a copy of British tabloid The Sun, renamed "The Son," on July 23. 
Empty bottles of alcohol sit outside Buckingham Palace in London on July 23. 
Crew members of the British warship HMS Lancaster celebrate the birth of the royal baby on patrol in the Caribbean in a handout photo released July 23. 
A sand sculpture was created by sand artist Sudarshan Pattnaik to celebrate the birth in Puri, India, on July 23. 
Crowds push forward to see the birth announcement on Monday, July 22. 
People clamor for their chance to see and photograph the birth announcement that was placed on a golden easel by the queen's press secretary on July 22. 
The London Eye Ferris wheel on the banks of the Thames is lit up in red, blue and white to mark the birth of the boy on July 22. 
The fountains at Trafalgar Square are lit blue to signify the birth of a boy on July 22. 
Royal fans celebrate the announcement of the birth of a boy to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at St. Mary's Hospital in London on July 22. 
Hayley Simmonds, an employee at the British restaurant and grocery Tea & Sympathy, celebrates the birth on July 22 by hanging a sign in the store's window in New York. 
Karen Milne, left, of Scotland wears a mask of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, as she and friends celebrate the royal birth at Ye Olde King's Head English Pub in Santa Monica, California, on July 22. 
Revelers crowd against the railing of Buckingham Palace in London after an official notice proclaiming the birth was put on display on July 22. 
Crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace on July 22 after the announcement of the birth. 
The queen's press secretary, Ailsa Anderson, left, and Badar Azim, a palace footman, place the official birth announcement on a golden easel in front of Buckingham Palace on July 22. 
Crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace cheer as Anderson places the birth announcement in front of the palace on July 22. 
A town crier reads the announcement of the birth outside the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital in London on July 22. 
Two of the gynecologists who attended to the duchess, Marcus Setchell, center, and Alan Farthing, right, leave the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital on July 22. 
Media gather outside the Lindo Wing of St. Mary's Hospital in London on July 22 as they await news of the birth. 
Crowds gather outside Buckingham Palace in London as news of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge's, labor arrives on July 22. 
A Buckingham Palace official on July 22 hands the birth announcement to a colleague in a car to be driven from St. Mary's Hospital in London to Buckingham Palace. 
Police guard the Lindo Wing at St. Mary's Hospital in London as crowds gather and await news of the birth of the first child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on July 22. 
Royal supporters are interviewed by a television crew outside St. Mary's Hospital on July 22. 
Crowds gather behind a barricade outside St. Mary's Hospital as they wait for news of the birth on July 22. 
Hospital staff look out over a gathering crowd at St. Mary's Hospital in London on July 22. 
Royal fan Teba Diatta stands outside St. Mary's Hospital with a cake decorated for the occasion on July 22. 
Royal supporter Margaret Tyler holds decorative balloons as she waits outside St. Mary's Hospital in London on Saturday, July 20. 
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- 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
Editor's note: Deborah Cohen is the author of "Family Secrets" and professor of humanities and history at Northwestern University. Follow her on Twitter: @DeborahACohen
(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 isn'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 wouldn'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.
Town crier announces birth of royal baby 
The royal baby: What happens next 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, doesn'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.
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The opinions in this commentary are solely those of Deborah Cohen.
