One thing that always confused me when I was younger was why ordinary people in the past would care if the monarch had a son/heir. I found it odd that they would be excited, it's not like they know if the little baby will be a good monarch. I had a teacher once tell me it was the equivalent of modern celebrity culture and that made sense to me so for a long time that was the only explanation in my head.
Then just recently, while I've been watching a lot of historical shows and reading historical books it finally smacked me in the face: it's about stability! Whether a monarch is good or not, you want them to have a healthy, legitimate heir so that when they die, everything keeps moving smoothly along. Change is scary. Succession struggles or wars are frightening and get people killed.
It wasn't until I became an older adult that I started to understand how much other people value stability; how much a lot of people just want their days to be predictable and relatively the same. Change of any kind, even for the possible better, is viewed with suspicion. The stock market always shrinks in fear when leadership changes, even if leadership is supposed to be competent.
The monarch having a healthy heir promises that things will stay the same and that's all a lot of people want. And this is not such a hard concept, I don't know why it took me 30 years to get here. (There is probably also an element of celebrity culture and the fact that many people love babies)
But do correct me if I'm wrong
