Bambino! Bellissimi bambini!
Friendly smiles and patting on the heads of small children often follow northern European families when they visit Italy with blond haired children.

And let me just point it out right away; Praising the children of tourists is not something the Italians do to please or charm anyone! They just do it, because they love children!
It is not unusual for Italian children to have a key role in the families when they are finally born (Italians usually become parents rather late in life).

As an outside person, you probably will not have to visit many restaurants before you meet a small Italian family consisting of a mother, a father and a smaller child, and you may have found that it often is the child who seems to controls the course of the battle – at least for as long as the child is under four years old. After that, a bit more good behavior is expected 😉 but until then it may sometimes seem like parental guidance is a bit far away.

Additionally, The majority of Italian couples today do not get more than a single child, and the traditional concept of an italian “mama” is changing. A trend that worries the country’s government so much that the Italian Minister of Health in 2016 ended up in a huge conflict when she presented a plan to get more babies in Italy through an advertising campaign and the introduction of a national “Fruitfulness Day.”

With the logo “Defend your fertility, prepare a cradle for your future, health minister Beatrice Lorenzin and her 137-page long fertility plan emerged in some what of a political storm – as the women in Italy certainly did not liked to be reduced to surrogate for the governments goal to Increased population growth.

If you have more than one or two children, there is often an extra recognizable nod from the city’s elderly, when you as a foreign family walk around the italian towns. Because for the italians, children are signs in wealth (of the inner kind, not the one you can keep in the bank) – and if you have many children, the wealth is of course greater.