How Portuguese Culture Makes It Easier To Parent

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3 days ago

This is part of Reason's 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
My baby was stolen in a Portuguese airport.
The culprit was a granny who worked in the bakery there, crafting pastéis de nata. While I was sorting out the rental car booking, my husband had taken our then-9-month-old son to fetch pastries. Our son quickly disappeared—taken behind the counter by an insistent old lady who wanted to show him around and, presumably, feed him spoonfuls of custard. Who am I to object to local custom?
Portuguese culture grants special privileges to children and families, and those privileges really do make a big difference. We've been to Lisbon, surf towns to the west, the Azores, and even Cabo Verde, the African island nation and former colony, where many of the same norms apply. Pregnant women, the elderly, and people traveling with young kids get special lines for airport security and customs, ushered through as fast as possible. Native Portuguese will get offended if they see you in the normal line, instructing you to go to the priority line and sometimes getting the attention of the customs officer to make sure the system is adhered to—the only time Southern Europeans have ever been rule-abiding!
Though their Northern European neighbors are strict about taxi cab car seat rules and paranoid about child safety on buses (in Norway they made me use a car seat), the Portuguese are relaxed about it, allowing parents to make whatever choices they deem best. This is helpful for those of us who don't travel with car seats, preferring to use public transit wherever possible.
Their playgrounds allow lots of risky play. We availed ourselves of Lisbon's Jardim da Estrela, which had plenty of climbing structures, including one extending more than 15 feet in the air, full of kids as young as 5 jousting for the top spot.
Contrast this with the American approach: Our illustrious federal regulators publish the Public Playground Safety Handbook, which discourages playground designers from using free-swinging ropes (which "present a potential strangulation hazard," as they could "fray" or "form a loop") and mandates the steepness of slides. Or worse, the New York approach: padlocking certain playgrounds, such as Hudson River Park's Pier 26 and Madison Square Park's, when it gets chilly out, because God forbid children slip or fall in the event that there's ice or snow. (Better to just stay inside glued to a screen, these policies seem to suggest.)
In Lisbon, the public park facilities even had a miniature bathroom for potty-training kids, but you could also freely change a diaper on a park bench. The nearby day cares dressed kids for rain or shine, and they seemed to make outdoor time a habit. The moms did not hover—a refreshing contrast to Manhattan and Brooklyn—and there was a healthy mix of moms and dads handling the kids. (To give credit where due, some Northern Europeans get good marks in these subjects. Playgrounds in Berlin are abundant and, in many cases, designed to maximize kid independence—and nasty weather rarely deters there, since active outdoor time is valued highly.)
At home in New York, I keep a list of fancy restaurants that tend to be welcoming toward babies and toddlers (Bonnie's in Williamsburg, Cafe Gitane in Lower Manhattan), precisely because it feels like a rarity: Several restaurants have adopted policies disallowing children (Jean-Georges, Bungalow). In Portugal, it's standard to see families out to dinner, and out quite late. Though the families don't tend to be huge—Portugal has not been immune to the sinking-birthrate issues that have plagued the rest of the developed world—they are rebounding a bit from a 2013 low of 1.21 births per woman.
Lots of cultures around the world get components of childrearing right: The American expats I met in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, let their kids roam free-range and almost universally homeschooled, seceding from the dominant parenting culture in America, the rat race, and the anxiety. (In some cases, they've deviated very far from the norm: One mom told me it's totally chill to breastfeed 8-year-olds. But I think that's just a hippie thing, not a Central American custom.) Panamanian parents in coastal towns like Playa Venao seem to let their young kids surf with abandon, unsupervised except by siblings. The aforementioned Germans have free-play areas where adults aren't allowed, such as Berlin's Abenteuerlicher Bauspielplatz Kolle 37, a playground with spots for climbing and hammer-and-nails construction and fire building. When I visited, a crowd of 9-year-olds were tending it with pokers; my toddler, not yet allowed in, seemed already to covet access to the flames.
But the Portuguese in particular grasp something I fear American parents miss: You don't have to recede from society once you have children, relegated only to explicitly kid-friendly spaces. The way to get children to learn how to fly and dine in restaurants and act civilized in public is to include them, and to let them practice again and again. Of course, those reps are easier gotten when you have a surrounding culture that acts like children are a gift, not a burden. The grace with which Portuguese culture treats families makes it easier to bear when your kid inevitably messes up in public; everyone who witnesses the tantrum or the spilled glass seems to realize that this is a normal part of living alongside kids—a little cost worth bearing to have a society that's warm and friendly and growing.
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