Please don't leave my children alone!

For us as a large family, one thing is clear. Viva Italia! The cappuccino is five times cheaper and three times better, and there's a plastic slide in the garden and a display of enthusiasm for small children. While our youngest spreads his milk foam all over the café, we are greeted with encouraging «complimenti» for our wonderful children. The beaming barista even interrupts his duty at the sacred plunger machine and gives our youngest a friendly pinch on the cheek. It feels good. Well, it's good for me. The night before, neither Bambino nor Bambina wanted to go to bed. Instead, they were ready again at six with the need for entertainment. And are now entertaining the café with a mixture of childish sleepiness and the onset of sugar shock from the chocolate-filled cornetti.

Does it bother my son that he was pinched on the cheek? No. Would we have been bothered by the same scene in a Swiss café? Very probably. However, this is not primarily about the difference between a breakfast scene in Switzerland and in Italy, but about that very pinch on the cheek.

As far away from the children as possible - really?

When I get on a tram in Zurich with my four children, I mainly get looks that want to tell me that the plague of locusts should please get off the tram again soon. But I don't blame them. The boys fight for a place by the window while the youngest throws his biscuits right across the carriage. So I do understand that the children of our time, who are conspicuously unconcerned with the conventions of the orderly adult world, can be quite annoying. Things were different in Thomas Mann's day. A «stable rule over the nature of the child», as a 19th century parenting guide put it, was mandatory back then. Children conformed.

It looks a lot different today. Of course, I'm also a child of our culture and when I get on a train, I make sure I'm as far away as possible from the maladjusted children who haven't had the benefit of black education so that I can watch the press conference with Peter Zeidler (not an education expert, but the coach of FC St. Gallen) in peace.

First me, then the family and then nothing for a long time

The most important point of reference in our highly individualised society is first and foremost myself, then comes the unit that I want to shape, which is the nuclear family, and then there is nothing else for a long time. If we're not even interested in our cousins, why should we care about the strange children in the next compartment? So why should we approach children at all?

Well, children generally like it when other people make jokes with them. And it can also be a nice gesture to tell a child's parents how «cute» the little rascal in the pram is. Sometimes it's also nice to hear that there isn't just this subjectively controlled bubble that is driven purely by parental love and hormones.

But it can also be too much of a good thing, which raises the legitimate question: when does it go too far?

I know parents for whom it is already too much if someone briefly touches little Leo (the name has of course not been changed by the editors). A mother once even told me that she found it terribly offensive when someone touched her pram on the tram. If a stranger were to pinch these children's cheeks, the police would probably have to be called.

Where are the limits?

A friend of mine who runs an after-school centre once told me that the children really enjoyed working with him.

«fight», so they find it great fun to compete with him and somehow get him on the mat. Is so much physical contact still allowed in 2021? If you ask the children, many would probably say yes. But it is also clear that we should protect children who are not good at dealing with closeness and distance or who have perhaps even been victims of sexual violence.

However, if this fear alone characterises our dealings with children, something important is lost, namely learning to express one's own boundaries. We should teach children this. We can't just release them into the bad world at the age of 18, but we should give them the ability to say no. This starts with the classic: The kiss from grandma. I can tell grandma to please stop delighting the children with the cheerful greeting rituals, or I can encourage my children to say no, even to turn away. Yes, they can refuse to kiss grandma.

But I would also like to see a little more Italianità. Let's at least try the «complimenti» and say that this baby is «Jööö» and makes me want to tell our children to turn us into grandparents as quickly as possible, or the fact that the neighbour's son has a good sense of humour or how wonderfully the little one can balance on the climbing frame in the playground three metres above the ground with a chocolate glacé. Then there may also be a high-five or a nice fist-bomb as confirmation. So, please don't leave my children alone, they could do with some outside interference to help them thrive.