Dear friends,
My family has spent most of April in the Umbrian hill town of Spello. This information would be unremarkable if not for the fact that we traveled with our two-month-old daughter. We are spending the final weeks of my wife’s maternity leave here.
In the autumn of 2020, when our son was born, we decided that should we have a second child, we wouldn’t spend the entire maternity leave at home. We would need a change of scenery, a change of pace, and some place to connect as a family of four while on a grand adventure. So when our daughter, Frances, arrived in early February, we booked a flight (criterion: a direct flight from Charlotte to a child-friendly country), got our two-week-old to pose for a passport photo at Walgreens, and found an Airbnb within a two-and-a-half-hour drive of the Rome airport.
What have we learned:
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People love to see newborns in their cities and neighborhoods. Italians, especially those of a certain age, love to stroke our baby’s hair or gently touch her feet. They don’t ask if they can, which, while a little unnerving at first, is a good reminder that “our” baby isn’t ours but a gift to all, as every baby is. The interdependence cultivated when people live closely to one another for centuries on end, but still take a convivial passeggiata (a leisurely stroll) each evening, highlights a universal truth: we are all connected, a baby is a baby, a seed of hope for each and all, no matter who the parents are.
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A child-friendly tone for a place is set at the airport. If you arrive with a baby, a toddler, strollers, car seats, and so many pieces of luggage I lost count, you are helped by airport staff and shown the way to the diplomatic passport lane.
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A child-friendly city has more to do with the absence of cars than the presence and prevalence of child-centric play spaces. Last Thursday, while parents drank Negronis at the bar in our neighborhood, we watched our son step out to play with the local kids—in the street. This is a mostly pedestrian zone, but the kids know how to react when a car or bike comes by. Yet cars rarely appeared, and when they did, they were of modest size and moving at a genuinely safe pace. The streets are for people, not cars, so they’re for child’s play too.
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No matter how young your child is or in what language we are speaking, when other parents see a newborn, they want to tell you about their kids—how old they are, where they live now, what they remember from the newborn months, and what their grandkids are up to. As John F. Kennedy said, “Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
I’ll return to Europe to speak at the Start with Children Summit in Bratislava in a few weeks. I’ll discuss the politics and economics of a care economy and how changing the economic constraints that families face today can build equity, fairness, solidarity, community, and democracy. Three weeks in Italy with a newborn could not have been a better preparation for that conversation.
All the best,
Joe Waters
Co-Founder + CEO
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