Italians love children and this is a charming feature of their culture. Strangers will often stop you to tell you how beautiful your kids are, but we should warn you that this is usually also accompanied by some physical contact, like, pinching their cheeks, touching their faces etc.

Our kids express a firm dislike of having their cheeks pinched. It is difficult to navigate around this if you do not speak Italian well. I usually smile and say “E timido/timida” (he/she is shy) and pull them close to me so the person has to reach around me to touch them. Or I laugh and say “Siamo Inglese!” (We are English), which they accept as a valid excuse for being weird. However, cheek pinching can often come completely out of the blue, and so it is hard to prepare for. If you are more relaxed then this might not bother you, in which case, enjoy the compliments, but do make sure that your child does not feel uncomfortable.

Italians are also very forthright about how children should be treated. They constantly panic about illness and have no qualms about stopping to berate you in public if they think your child is dressed wrong. Usually they don’t think you have put enough clothes on your kid. Specific complaints are that they don’t have a scarf (they believe this causes neck pain or flu), their T-shirt is riding up when they’re playing (they think that an exposed tummy causes diarrhoea) or your child is sweaty (causing flu). Waiters raise their eyebrows when I give my children fizzy water or even worse cold water (which can apparently kill you in summer due to the rapid change in your stomach’s temperature but an ice-cream is safe…) and friends always tut at me for putting a fan on in the house (causes ear infection) or the air conditioning (causes flu or neck pain). It is a daily occurrence for me to be stopped in the street to be told off for dressing my child wrong, and the only way to react is just say “Grazie” and walk away…

But more than anything, Italians are great with children. They are tolerant and welcome them everywhere.