On a recent weekend, I came home to my son Lorenzo, who’s almost six, sobbing. I had just taken my other son León for a walk while he napped, and the tears threw me. Lorenzo was shaking, standing next to Nacho, my partner, in the garden.

“Il riccio,” he told me. While I was away, Lorenzo had spotted a hedgehog in the garden shed. He was overjoyed. We live in the outskirts of Athens, where tortoises live in the wild, and we often get visits from hedgehogs, especially in summer when they come searching for water.

But as they got closer, they realised that the hedgehog was dead. He had gotten stuck in between some plastic pots, his head poking out of a hole, his body rigid.

They picked him up with Nacho, dug a hole, and buried him by the mandarin tree. That’s where I saw him sobbing.

They had placed a ceramic pot to mark the burial spot, and Lorenzo wanted to give the hedgehog offerings. He picked a lemon from the neighbours’ tree and placed it in the pot. He then went looking for small wild flowers in the lawn. I suggested we add some mint and basil from our plants. He placed a ball there too.

Still sobbing, Lorenzo went into the kitchen to pick some food from the fridge as an offering. I was so touched by how shaken he was by this critter’s death that I just wanted to hug him really tight.

There was a long day ahead of us. So I suggested that we could draw the hedgehog to remember him. And then he said: let’s write a book! His eyes lit up. He went into action mode, walked upstairs to pick some blank A4 pages, and sat at the kitchen table with all his pencils and markers, folding the papers in halves to create a sort of booklet.

Lorenzo had written a book before, with Anna, his babysitter. It was about Pokemon. He cannot write independently yet, but he likes to have words spelled out for him after he decides what sentence to write.

We had a conversation about how to depict the hedgehog. He wanted to see the picture of the dead animal and print it. I tried to explain that it would be nice to remember the hedgehog alive and found old pictures of the other hedgehogs who had visited us in the past. (“It is the same one!” he said.)

And then he went on to draw the altar he had created for the hedgehog, leaving out the image of death.

Before getting into the part about the hedgehog, the book has two pages showing lightning and a dark sky. It reads: “The night before, there was a thunderstorm.”

I was so proud of Lorenzo for transforming his pain into something creative, of how resourceful he is. And it made me think about how often we at home use storytelling and reading as tools to figure out issues at home. And it made me think again about the power of storytelling.

The power of stories — and your support

Telling stories can transform people — both those whose stories are told and those who are telling the stories — for better or for worse.

There are stories that we can tell in ways that make us feel better about ourselves and the world — at least this is what some of the research out there seems to suggest. (If you are interested in this subject, this episode of the Hidden Brain podcast is a good place to start.)

I believe that this newsletter is a wonderful space for me to transform some of my struggles with the world around us into something else. I often struggle with motivation. I often wonder what the point of these words is, given just how tragic the world is, especially for the youngest children out there living in war and crisis. But week after week, here we are. I have written over 230 newsletters over these past four years — and you readers and supporters have been there to support me through this process.

There are many things that I plan on changing in 2025 (including getting in touch again more regularly with the community and trying some meet-ups), but for now, I would love to thank you once again for being there for me — four years in!

With love and care,
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo credits and alt-text: Lina Kivaka on Pexels. An adult, likely a parent, is reading a children’s book to a young child. The page they are reading shows a humorous illustration of a red fox sitting on a bed with various clothing items scattered around, under the caption “Poor old Fox. Has lost his socks.” The adult’s hand is visible, pointing to the page, while the child, whose back is to the camera, is attentively looking at the book.

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We know just how important family bonds are for children to grow up healthily. Research shows clearly the detrimental effects of institutional care on children, and the harm that family separation in migration settings can create — especially for the youngest children.

Yet, families are far from perfect. It is within family settings that abuse can take place, as well as neglect. We don’t have to dig deep into any formal research to know that there are families who are detrimental to a child’s wellbeing.

So, how can we try to keep families together if we know that the family unit itself can potentially be very dangerous? Child protection services, or social services, walk this very fine line every day — and they often get the balance wrong.

Children’s wellbeing: a recent concern

Children’s wellbeing is a relatively recent worry for governments. The concept of child abuse was not even acknowledged until the 1960s. As this BBC podcast explains, it was a U.S. paediatrician who was the first one to define the ideas around child abuse for the medical community. In 1962, Dr. Henry C. Kempe and his colleagues published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on what they called “The Battered-Child Syndrome.”

“The Battered-Child Syndrome is a term used by us,” wrote the authors, “to characterize a clinical condition in young children who have received serious physical abuse, generally from a parent or foster parent.”

“Beating of children is not confined to people with a psychopathic personality or of borderline socioeconomic status. It also occurs among people with good education and stable financial and social background.”

The article was a turning point for how society views children. While historians assume that child abuse (both physical and sexual) was just as common in the past as it is now, it was rarely documented because there were no legal nor medical frameworks to use to talk about it.

Larry Wolff, a history professor at New York University, wrote a book about a case that took place in Venice in the 18th century: a 60-year-old man who was accused of having sex with an 8-year-old girl was charged simply with “causing a scandal” and made to pay a fine to the girl’s family. “There was no other plausible criminal charge on the books,” writes Wolff.

In a separate book, Wolff also documented cases of child abuse in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. While Sigmund Freud was theorising about the Oedipus complex and hostilities between parents and children, Wolff looked at four cases of child abuse who dominated the pages of the newspapers — but failed to be addresses properly.

“It was only after [Kempe’s] medical ‘discovery’ in 1962 that child abuse was recognised as a regular and recurring aspect of family life, not a sensational exception but a common syndrome,” writes Wolff.

The birth of child services

While some types of child protection agencies existed prior to the 1962 paper, they were often controversial (in New York, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was asked to step in to aid children) and biased against marginalised groups, including those living in poverty, migrants, and indigenous populations.

That logic led to the creation in the 19th century of the Orphan Train Movement, a welfare programme that relocated up to 200,000 children from cities in the East coast of the United States to foster homes in rural areas of the Midwest who needed farming labor. The leaders of the orphan train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but mostly they were children of new immigrants and of families living in poverty.

In Switzerland, well into the 1970s, children of unmarried mothers or from poor families were taken away from their parents and sent to live with new ones, especially on farms, where they were mainly abused and forced to work.

There were also the brutal residential or boarding schools that tore away indigenous children from their families in Canada, the United States, and Australia, among other countries.

The legacy of these awful programmes serve as a reminder of systemic failures in protecting vulnerable children.

Yet many countries still have systems in place designed to remove children from their families of origin, often citing protection as the rationale. Unfortunately, these institutions frequently perpetuate separation because of inherent bias or because they have no other means to support families to do a better job at home.

Anglo-American child protection systems have had huge increases in the numbers of referrals and reports of child abuse, with more investigations into the most vulnerable communities. In the U.S., there is an overrepresentation of African American and Latino children in welfare investigations. One study found that 53% of all Black children will experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18, while one in 10 Black children are separated from their parents by the Child Welfare System.

But as professor of social work Andy Bilson points out, “sadly, we have no evidence that child protection systems at the national level reduce harm to children.”

A similar trend seems to be happening in Europe, where migrant and Roma families are overrepresented in most countries’ social welfare systems, even though data is often not available.

Are these families being targeted because they also live in poverty and social workers consider poverty as a factor to separate children from their families? With all the neuroscientific knowledge we have now on the importance of supporting families and keeping them together, how much is actually passed down on social workers? How much oversight is there of their single actions?

I am proud to support a team of journalists across Europe in investigating cases of biases and discrimination of child protection services thanks to a grant we have recently received. It is vital to share the stories of those who have suffered injustices and to explore how states can better serve children and their families.

I would love to hear from you. Are you researching the topic? Do you know of interesting cases that provide positive solutions? Please, get in touch, and help me contribute to this important journalistic work.

What I’ve been reading

This is a beautiful first-person piece by journalist Lynzy Billing about her life as a teenager in Jerusalem. Through conversations with her Palestinian and Israeli classmates, 16 years after having left Israel, she talks about deep trauma and different narratives.

What I’ve been listening to

This interview with British psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry was insightful in many ways. There is a bit in there about how necessary it is to pay attention to our kids when they become insistent about doing something with us. Especially when we parents are trying to save time, she says, it may be easier to sit down and concentrate on playing with them for five or ten minutes, until they catch their own flow and you can then focus on your things again. She also talks a lot about how difficult it is to change things in one’s life — and how necessary.

What I’ve been watching

I’ve been watching a Spanish comedy TV series on Netflix called Machos Alfa (Alpha Males) and I got a few good laughs out of it. The series focuses on four male friends in their forties who start realising that, with all the social changes happening, their usual male privileges aren’t what they used to be. Each one has to adjust in his own way. In the first season, they sign up for a “deconstructing masculinity” course, and the lessons they learn start to shift their outlooks, at least partially. Interestingly, two of the protagonists are fathers, and they seem to be the ones who are more flexible when it comes to adjusting to a new paradigm of masculinity.

What’s been inspiring me

This BBC podcast about children learning music in devastated, war-torn Gaza is bittersweet. Thanks to the drive of some musicians, the local branch of the Palestinian national music conservatory is still operating in makeshift tents in Gaza. Children are singing and practising the violin, guitar and traditional instruments such as the ‘oud. One boy, Mohammed Abu Aideh, started playing the violin after he lost his hand in an airstrike. And the parents are surprised by how much the children who have music in their lives feel better on a daily basis.

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo credits and alt-text: Soraya Irving on Unsplash. Close-up of a child wearing owl-patterned pajamas, playing with a small orange toy boat featuring wooden figures and a fabric sail labeled ‘PlanToys’.

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Childhood is political.

The decisions about who has a child, when, and how go far beyond personal choices. Authoritarian and populist politicians the world over are despairing over falling birth rates. They are trying (and often succeeding) to set strict rules about conception and birth while proclaiming themselves pro-family.

The latest to burst onto the political scene is Romania’s Călin Georgescu, a pro-Russian outsider who surprised political commentators by becoming the frontrunner in the presidential race (the run-off vote is on Dec. 8). Georgescu, who owes a lot of his fame to TikTok, has very conservative views about women and family. He has said that women are not good political leaders because their main role is to support men and become mothers. He has also called caesarean birth a tragedy.

While we wouldn’t want a politician to decide whether it is a good time to have a C section or not, we should also wish for political leaders to let go of empty propaganda talk (think of JD Vance and his “childless” cat ladies) and understand what really helps caregivers and the youngest children. The policies are clear — from parental leave to universal daycare, to cash handouts to parents and free health checks, among others — there are many ways that we can really support families. And these don’t seem to be on the political agenda of any populist leader.

That is because these leaders think of families as small, independent businesses — but that is deeply flawed. If a single family fails to create a proper support network for a child, then what happens to that child? That is why we need better community networks, and a deeper understanding that we should care about every child out there, not just the ones that are genetically related to us.

This week I want to share a piece I first published in September 2020 connected to the topic of political leaders and childhood — because it is still relevant.

Everybody Was a Child Once. Remember that when They Turn into Your Political Foes (or Worse)

The boy was two years old when his mother disappeared from his life.

Struggling to recover from the birth of a younger son, she constantly went in and out of hospital. Without her, the boy relied on his eldest sister, 12 at the time, who bathed her four younger siblings, fed them, tucked them in at night.

The boy learned to fear his father, the only adult in the household, from a very young age. He spent long hours away from home, working in real estate. On the rare occasions he was present physically, he was absent emotionally. He thought children were nuisances who needed to be trained to obey. Boys in particular, he believed, had to be treated sternly because emotions could corrupt them.

Like any toddler, the boy needed play time to discover the world and his carers’ attention to thrive and develop. But when he cried, he was scolded or, worse, ignored. The person the boy needed the most was the one he was most terrified of.

The impossible task of gaining his father’s approval became so important to the boy that later, when he grew up to become the 45th president of the United States, he put a picture of his dad in pride of place on his desk in the Oval Office.

The first time I felt empathy for Donald J Trump

I was surprised to learn that Donald J Trump, who grew up in an incredibly wealthy family, suffered from emotional neglect as a child.

“Neglect is the form of maltreatment most connected to poverty, but emotional neglect, what we are seeing here, is perhaps the most insidiously damaging form, and the form most likely to occur in a wealthy family. Not all neglect results in attachment disorders, but this is one risky. The stress of not being attended to and reassured in your emotional distress is very hard on a baby, and can have many effects on the developing brain, including areas used in social reasoning, impulse control, planning, and other executive functions. An interesting list for one of the most dysfunctional administrations in memory,” says Stephen Boos, a paediatrician focusing on child abuse and a member of The First 1,000 Days newsletter.

The information caught me so off-guard that something totally unexpected happened: briefly, as I thought of Donald, the young boy, I felt empathy for the twice-elected US president.

That empathy only goes so far. When I think of all the ways Trump has harmed other people’s childhoods — from separating migrant children from their families, to not taking the coronavirus threat seriously to calling Black Lives Matter bad for Black people and enforcing policing instead of calling for justice — that empathy vanishes very quickly, being replaced by a sense of dread of what is to come in 2025.

But the question remained in the back of my mind: are we facing the case of a neglected child who turned into a neglectful president?

No matter how powerful you become, you were helpless at the start of your life

As someone who spends all my time thinking, reading and writing about the first 1,000 days of life, I know that childhood is intrinsically political.

I often say any neighbour’s child may turn out to be our next president. No matter how powerful someone eventually becomes, everybody is always helpless at the start of their life. It’s crucial that children have the care and attention they need to feel heard, understood and loved so they can make empathetic and fair decisions later in life. Decisions that may end up directly affecting you, me and everybody else.

But I had never thought of the actual first 1,000 days of one of the most powerful people on Earth, until I read Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by the former president’s only niece, Mary Trump. She is the second child of Frederick Trump Jr, Donald’s older brother, who passed away in 1981. She is a self-confessed Democrat and is openly against her uncle’s policies. Moreover, she was cut out of her grandfather’s will — which she describes in the book — and provided documents for a New York Times award-winning investigation into the wrongdoings of the Trump Empire. All of this has led those close to Donald Trump to decry her work as “crazy” or worse.

The past few years have seen countless books about the former president’s history and psychology, but Too Much and Never Enough is unique because it filters her family memories through her experience as a clinical psychologist.

As she puts it: “If we’re lucky, we have, as infants and toddlers, at least one emotionally available parent who consistently fulfils our needs and responds to our desires for attention.”

The book is a reminder of how much events in our childhood can mark us later in life, how crucial love and care are to a child, and how much trauma can disrupt their development. Most importantly, it shows how material wealth far from guarantees a healthy environment for a child.

Why Trump is a bully and a narcissist

In her book, Mary Trump touches on two important psychological development theories to explain how Trump turned into the political figure the media obsesses over.

The first is attachment theory — the idea that a carer can offer a child a sense of safety and belonging. Children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver in order to develop socially and emotionally.

The second is mirroring, when a carer can process a baby’s feelings by reflecting them back, essentially translating into words and feelings what the child cannot yet identify and express. This is based on the idea that children learn new behaviours by observing and imitating others.

She writes: “Just as a secure attachment to a primary caregiver can lead to higher levels of emotional intelligence, mirroring is the root of empathy.”

She points out that the president experienced neither as a child. While his mother was unwell and absent, his father was the main source of nurturing for the children. But the author calls Fred Trump’s treatment of his children — parental bullying, lack of emotional attachment and encouragement, incessant criticism, disparaging comments and toxic positivity* — psychological abuse.

(*Fred Trump was a fan of The Power of Positive Thinking, a self-help book written by Norman Vincent Peale in 1952, which became a bestseller. Mary Trump writes that her grandfather had never handled his wife’s injuries and illnesses well. ‘My grandfather would say something like “Everything’s great. Right, Toots? You just have to think positive,” and then leave the room as quickly as possible, leaving her alone to deal with her pain.’)

This behaviour would scar Donald for life, resulting in “displays of narcissism, bullying and grandiosity” that started to show in his early years.

Take bullying, for example — something that Donald Trump has been accused of over and over again during his presidency (think about how much he targeted Greta Thunberg, for example). He already started bullying his younger brother Robert very early on – going as far as hiding his brother’s favourite toys just to spite him – and became unbearable at home.

“Mary [Trump’s mother] remained a bystander.” She did not know how to discipline Donald and was eventually relieved when he was sent to military school at age 13 after being reprimanded one time too many.

How we are raised affects the people we become

Overall, Fred celebrated Donald’s aggressive behaviour, leading him to believe that acting like a tough guy – or a “killer”, as he put it – was key to success. He also liked to elevate Donald’s extroverted and bombastic nature to Freddy, the writer’s father, who went from heir apparent to the Trump empire to being considered a failure when he became an airline pilot. Donald, then 18 and fresh out of military school, told Freddy, who was seven years older: “Dad’s right about you: you’re nothing but a glorified bus driver.” How much does this differ from Trump calling US veterans “losers” and “suckers”?

Donald clearly appears uninterested in being agreeable, especially with women. While at university, Donald approached Annamaria, the girlfriend of one of his brother’s best friends, and told her he was disappointed with her for going to a certain boarding school. Annamaria, three years older, responded: “Who are you to be disappointed in me?” That ended the conversation – much like it happened when female reporters pushed back during press conferences with the former president.

But it was narcissism that was Donald’s defining trait. His bombastic, funny comments turned him into a media darling as soon as he joined his father’s line of work. Fred, the son of immigrants from Germany, was good at negotiating and making deals, but did not have such a public persona. Donald had a very large allowance to sport luxury cars and ingratiated himself in the circles of power. His niece writes that Donald constantly sought approval and positive reinforcement.

Mary elaborates further: “This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved. So he must draw you in if he can by getting you to assent to even the most seemingly insignificant thing.”

Just think of the former president reciting the phrase “person, woman, man, camera, TV” on Fox News to prove his cognitive abilities. I see a six-year-old trying desperately to impress his father while reciting a (rather unimpressive) Christmas poem.

Every time I see Trump in difficulty, he seems to revert to the primitive part of his brain and either end a conversation with abuse or a personal attack, effectively with a tantrum, or trying to draw attention to something he did well – just like a child. He would rather lie or say something misleading than lose an argument — the same irrational approach that some children may show

Mary writes: “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesise information.”

We’re raising the next US president right now

Most reviews of Mary Trump’s book focused on details of what Trump had done wrong growing up: him allegedly paying someone to take his SATs or commenting on his niece’s breasts.

But what matters most about Mary Trump’s book is that it shows just how important it is to question how we’re raising our children. Even though every childhood is different, all children have the same needs – to be cared for and loved when we are born is inherently human. So even though there’s no single recipe for parenting, it is crucial that we take children, and their needs, seriously.

The emotional neglect Trump experienced was a type of malnourishment. Where he could have been fed with love and tenderness and a sense of protection, baby Donald felt insecure, unprotected, and in need of calling for even more attention.

Emotional neglect, just like physical malnourishment, doesn’t represent an immediate sentence for future life, and can be countered throughout life through therapy, social support, and healthy habits, as I wrote about in the past, but it still has an impact on the way a child grows to become an adult.

We need to talk more openly about how we grew up to be the adults we are today and how we want to raise our children. When we’re raising the next president, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Thanks to member of The First 1,000 Days, Stephen Boos, a US paediatrician focusing on abuse, for reading the article before publication and giving valuable feedback.

Photo credits and alt-text: charlesdeluvio on Unsplash, a child’s hand pressing keys on a laptop keyboard, viewed from above. The laptop is placed on a wooden table, with a marble surface visible in the background.

The post Populism meets parenting appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, is a tidy, green city, with wide boulevards and neoclassical architecture in the city centre and socialist apartment buildings in the outskirts. In autumn, the air pollution becomes bad because the city is enclosed by mountains, but overall Sofia is pleasant, walkable, and child friendly too. There are pedestrian streets, many green areas and playgrounds for kids to play — and also a beautiful experiential children’s museum called Muzeiko.

But you cross an invisible border as soon as you enter the neighborhood of Fakulteta. Home to one of the largest Roma communities in Europe, Fakulteta does not appear in its current shape on the municipal maps. Like favelas in Brazil or villas in Argentina, it is an informal settlement without basic services and a mix of sheet metal shelters and brick houses built by those who have for all intents and purposes taken over the land. There are open sewers in some parts of the neighbourhood. Otherwise, residents come up with their own makeshift solutions.

There is no government-run kindergarten, despite the population of the neighbourhood being 40,000-50,000, including an estimated 3,000 children between the ages of 0 and 14.

Early childhood education is clearly not a priority for a lot of governments worldwide. In Europe, many governments are struggling to meet the so-called Barcelona targets, which EU leaders agreed upon in 2002, saying that childcare should be provided for 33% of children under three and for 90% of children between three years old and the mandatory school age. (The targets were updated in 2022, but a lot of countries are still far behind.)

For Roma children, there is an even wider gap: 60% of Roma children under the age of three do not have access to Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) services nearby, according to the 2023 REYN Early Childhood Research Study.

What does it feel like to be excluded from a very early age? During the ISSA early childhood conference in Sofia in October, I got a chance to listen to several Roma rights activists on the issues their community is facing. And on how a nonprofit organisation and the community collaborated to do something the government wouldn’t do by itself — building a playground in an area where children have no space but the streets to play outside.

A community effort

As Boryana Dzhambazova, a colleague and friend and member of The First 1,000 Days community, explains in this piece, one foundation has been working very hard to create spaces for children and their caregivers.

The Health and Social Development Foundation (HESED), a local nonprofit that has been working with the Bulgarian Roma community for more than two decades, set up two centres in Fakulteta from where they run some of the neighbourhood’s few preschool programmes — as well as creating support during pregnancy and more.

And now they are about to open up Fakulteta’s first-ever playground.

It was a long and difficult process that resulted from a private donation. The Sofia Municipality then provided 65% of the funding, as part of a process whereby citizens of Sofia voted for their top project — the playground came fourth among thirty-eight proposals.

They had to clear rubbish from and drain a patch of abandoned land next to one of the centers they run in Fakulteta before they could start the construction last fall. There were of course challenges and setbacks: mud flowed over into the neighbouring houses and rats were released into the neighbourhood.

But the key was involving the community from the start, says Iskra Stoykova, who works for the Trust for Social Achievement (TSA), one of the key supporters of the project and of HESED’s overall work.

Stoykova, who supports the organisation’s approach toward maternal and infant wellbeing among Bulgaria’s most impoverished citizens, explained that parents and their children sat down to decide what to add to the playground and what colours it should be painted in.

Images courtesy of TSA

“No-go” neighbourhoods

The playground, which will be named “Charlene’s Garden” in the memory of the private donor Gary McDougal’s late wife), is limited in its scope. It will be open only during the centre’s working hours and will be protected by fences and security cameras to avoid vandalism. Previous, smaller experiments failed, says Stoykova, because only a part of the community was involved and felt connected to the idea.

What’s interesting is that when I told an audience in Sofia that I had had the privilege of visiting Fakulteta, there was an audible gasp. Look, I get it. One of the things I love most about my job is visiting places that regular citizens don’t get access to on a normal day — either because they are off-limits physically (think of a president’s office) or because they are off-limits in their imagination.

Roma are the largest ethnic minority in Europe, yet the struggles Roma children face receive very little attention. For most Sofia residents, going to Fakulteta makes no sense, in a similar way a regular Neapolitan would never go to the Scampia neighbourhood just to check it out, or a Buenos Aires resident wouldn’t go into Villa 31. As a journalist, I visited all these places, not for tourism but to ask questions and learn about the great work that some organisations do on the ground to change things and to fight stereotypes.

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle. Special thanks to Boryana Dzhambazova for helping me fact-check this week’s edition.

Images courtesy of TSA

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The Italian parliament made it illegal earlier this month for people to go abroad to have a baby via surrogacy.

Giorgia Meloni, the country’s first-ever female prime minister, has been battling to get the bill passed since she came into office in 2022.

For Meloni, it’s always been a fight for “feminism”. But the truth is more complex — and darker too.

Targeting LGBTQ+ families

“A common sense norm against the commodification of the female body and children,” Meloni celebrated on X. “Human life has no price and is not a bargaining chip.”

On the website of her political party, Brothers of Italy, the news is accompanied by the image of a pregnant belly turned into a piggy bank, with a one-euro coin being thrown into it.

Surrogacy has been illegal in Italy since 2004. Anyone who facilitates, organises or advertises surrogacy commits an offense of criminal relevance that can be punished with up to two years in jail and fines of up to one million euros. But now, after the October 16 vote in the upper house, the law extends the ban and the same fines and jail terms to those who go to foreign countries where surrogacy is legal.

It is unclear how the law could actually be applied, as legal experts such as Filomena Gallo told La Stampa newspaper: “It is legally inapplicable. To punish in Italy a crime committed in another country, it needs to be considered a crime there as well.”

LGBTQ+ couples, who are not allowed to adopt or use IVF in Italy, consider the legislation an attack against them. Veiled behind a discourse about the rights of women, right-wing politicians are trying to make it impossible for them to have a family, they say.

Yet approximate data show that of the 250 births by surrogate mothers who are registered in Italy every year, 90% are from heterosexual couples.

Hiding behind ‘women’s rights’

So, what is the government’s end game? Are they trying to hide behind a women’s rights discourse to make this project more palatable? Surrogacy has become a business that “demeans the dignity of women”, Meloni has said over and over again.

“Motherhood cannot become a market, women’s bodies cannot be rented out, lives cannot be bought, and we are concerned about mind-boggling numbers and figures, to the detriment of women who often find themselves in economic hardship or who in any case have as their main motive for joining this market that of the promised compensation,” said Fratelli d’Italia.

After the law was passed yesterday, Family, Equal Opportunity and Natality Minister Eugenia Roccella said: “Those who are entrenched behind the rhetoric of ‘rights’ to justify the practice of womb renting, should ask themselves why there is instead a worldwide network of feminism that supports Italy’s initiative and considers our country an example to be followed everywhere.”

It is true that there are feminists around the world who see surrogacy as a form of modern slavery and commercialisation of the body. Don’t get me wrong: I also worry about the exploitation of commercial surrogacy in “cheap hubs,” as was the case of Nepal, Kenya or Ukraine.

But I also don’t believe in these absolute bans — especially when they are hiding something deeper. If the problem is that we are not remunerating women fairly for their work carrying a pregnancy, shouldn’t that be the focus of a fight against how commercial surrogacy currently works?

Also, if we are so worried about women carrying a fetus that is not their own, why isn’t Meloni in favour of abortion too?

A different idea of family

As British feminist scholar Sophie Lewis writes in her 2019 book Full Surrogacy Now, we should expand the right of surrogate mothers towards the babies they gestate to acknowledge that surrogates are more than mere vessels, thus breaking down our assumptions that children necessarily belong to those whose genetics they share.

I simply don’t buy any of this so-called feminist rhetoric that Meloni is using. As an Italian journalist who has been covering children and the idea of caregiving for the past six years, I often find myself covering which governments worldwide really try to make people’s lives easier and which ones encourage young people to have children. Given the natality crisis in large parts of the global North is facing, this is a pertinent question.

It is also, by the way, one of the Meloni government’s foremost worries, apparently.

Perhaps these considerations are indeed connected — just not in the way they think.

To me, Meloni and people like her — I am thinking of JD Vance and his criticism of childless “cat ladies” — are interested in more children being born only if they fit within their ideas of family: heterosexual, with the right passport, and wealthy enough not to put demands on the overall state machinery.

But it is exactly that strict idea of family that is making it impossible for younger generations to think about taking on the huge responsibility of having children. The more politicians try to barge into the OB-GYN room, and the more they restrict the possibilities of who we can consider parents, the more difficult they make the prospect of building a life with children.

If instead we expand the definition of family and take collective responsibility for all children — rather than only caring for the ones we share DNA with — we can imagine a radically different and more fruitful future. And it just happens to share a vision with the proverbial village that helped humanity evolve into who we are today.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Worldcrunch.

What I’ve been reading

In this story in Rolling Stone magazine, Eli Cahan talks to mothers in the United States whose children were taken away from them because they smoked weed. Black mothers are more likely to come under scrutiny, despite conflicting evidence on whether weed may harm newborns. The issue is crucial because it underscores racial disparities in social services and the tension between evolving drug policies and outdated enforcement practices. At the same time, it highlights how a potential drug risk is taken more seriously than family separation, even if there is clear evidence that the latter has long-term effects on nearly every aspect of a child’s health.

What I’ve been listening to

The podcast episode “We Need To Talk About Intuitive Eating“ discusses the growing popularity of intuitive eating, which promotes letting children eat freely, even including candy with dinner. Hosts question whether this hands-off approach helps escape harmful diet culture or if it’s just another fleeting trend. They delve into the potential benefits and drawbacks, reflecting on how intuitive eating fits into broader conversations about health and wellness — and it is quite an interesting reflection both on how we parents were raised in terms of our eating habits, and how our beliefs affect how we condition our children in their approach to food.

What I’ve been watching

This video by South-Korean-Japanese rapper Chanmina where she proudly shows off her pregnant belly. Some of the lyrics go: “Too skinny, too fat. Too big, too short. Dying, dying, dying, women are dying”. I found this gem through the what happened last week newsletter — a great source for non-Western news recommended by Joram, one of the members of The First 1,000 Days community!

What’s been inspiring me

In July, Sweden launched a groundbreaking new law that allows grandparents or friends of caregivers to get paid parental leave while taking care of grandchildren or children of friends. This is possible for up to three months of a child’s first year. It is hard to write about solutions for caregivers without always looking at Scandinavia — Sweden after all was the first country in the world to introduce leave for fathers 50 years ago. But this story is particularly inspiring because it pushes our thinking towards creating a wider net of caregiving, which is fundamental for children.

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

The post A surrogacy ban is not feminist appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

**This article contains discussions of childhood abuse, including sexual violence, that may be distressing for some readers. Please proceed with care and take breaks as needed. If you are affected by these topics, consider seeking support from a trusted person or professional.

I don’t usually write about childhood abuse because it is one of those topics that makes me so sick to my stomach that it paralyses me. So much so that I actually took way too long to write this newsletter (and ended up skipping a whole week).

But UNICEF has just released the first-ever global estimate of how big the problem of sexual violence against children is. And the numbers are shocking.

More than 370 million girls and women alive today – or 1 in 8 – have experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18. The number goes up to 1 in 5 women when ‘non-contact’ forms of sexual violence, such as online or verbal abuse, are included. Also, around 1 in 11 boys report having experienced rape or sexual assault during childhood.

It is hard to swallow that violence against children is so pervasive. Any intentional harm or mistreatment to a child under 18 years old is considered child abuse — we are talking about physical, sexual, emotional and/or psychological maltreatment or neglect.

Nearly 3 in 4 children — or 300 million children — aged 2–4 years regularly suffer physical punishment and/or psychological violence at the hands of parents and caregivers, says the World Health Organization.

I recently had to prepare to deliver a workshop at an international journalism conference in Athens and I had to stop and think a little more deeply about how we approach the idea of child abuse as a society. We journalists have an important role, which is to make sure that truth is uncovered and that perpetrators are caught and punished. But what is the line between reporting what is needed and our weird fascination with the world’s worst horrors?

I think we can tell a lot about how we think about it by starting how difficult it was to get to the data to begin with. The report is based on surveys done between 2010 and 2022 across 120 countries — and they are retrospective, i.e. adults reflecting on their past. But it wasn’t easy.

Until 2015, gathering data about sexual violence against children wasn’t even on the global agenda. That changed when the international community committed to ending all forms of violence against children with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). One of these goals, Target 16.2, specifically focuses on ending abuse, exploitation, trafficking, and violence against children by 2030. UNICEF was put in charge of tracking one key measure: how many young people (aged 18 to 29) experienced sexual violence before turning 18. This was a major step, but comparing data across countries has been tough, as definitions and measurements of violence vary widely.

To address these challenges, UNICEF developed the International Classification of Violence against Children (ICVAC), with input from over 200 experts worldwide. This is the first global standard for defining and measuring violence against children, approved by the UN in 2023. While this is a big milestone, simply having a global standard isn’t enough.

The next step is working on tools to turn these definitions into meaningful data that can be compared across countries, helping us understand the real scope of the issue and what action can be taken worldwide.

My own experience of abuse

I myself was abused as a child. I was five or six years old. It happened once. With someone that was external to my family — a hairdresser. While my mom was getting her haircut in another part of the salon, the hairdresser used the time to touch me, and I simply could not speak out. I did — months later.

My mom at the time tried to report the incident to several people in the place where we lived. She heard that many knew about this hairdresser and how “fond” he was of little girls, as people would nicely put it. There wasn’t a clear avenue that my mom could pursue to report him properly to the police, nor any help at the time that seemed available for her or for myself, for that matter.

I remember, one night at a IWMF fellowship, some ten years ago, talking to a great journalist who was about to pursue a story about her gym professor who had abused her when she was a child. (The podcast, Silent Evidence, is here. The journalist is called Tennessee Watson.) Tennessee talked about how hard it was to cover this story, and how survivors of abuse feel about themselves and their bodies. She spoke of insecurity, of body issues, of eating disorders — some of which I could recognise in myself. I remember that something clicked. I understood that in a layer of myself, there was also the part of me that had survived abuse.

I think I’ve processed this long enough in therapy. And I am well. And I’m profoundly shaken by it in all the ways that I can be profoundly shaken by it.

I have also researched trauma enough to know that I was lucky because my episode of abuse was a one-off and it didn’t involve a family member or someone within our circle (which is what usually happens). Sexual abuse is one of those so-called Adverse Childhood Experiences (Aces) that can have a long-lasting effect on people’s mental, emotional, spiritual and physical health, as I’ve written in the past.

What I ask myself, as a survivor and journalist, is why we are so terribly obsessed with the details of what happens — and we are not as obsessed with focusing on how to support people in overcoming their experiences?

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo by Teresa Howes on Pexels, A soft, light brown teddy bear sits on a bed, facing away from the camera, looking towards a bright window with curtains.

The post Abuse affects millions of children. I was one of them appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

“Sí.”

Your inner child speaks Italian, said my therapist, and I burst into tears.

We had been discussing some revelation I had about how severe one of my internal voices is — and how connected that voice is to my childhood. And my therapist had suggested that we needed to work more on reconciling my identities.

And then came my affirmation in Italian. I never let Italian slip in a conversation, unless I know it can be welcomed and understood. It came out, just like that.

When I moved to Scotland to study after high school in Naples, I did my best to remove Italian from my everyday life. There was no WhatsApp to stay in touch with my friends, and phone calls home were expensive. I started writing my diaries in English. I avoided fellow Italians in town and spoke to them in English only. (I have since apologised to several of them who stayed in touch, despite my obnoxiousness.)

And now, decades later, some Italian just slipped through me in a very emotional moment. And I realised how much I had asked that 17-year-old version of me to leave behind.

Crying with an accent

Children start recognising sounds in utero. Not only do they recognise sounds, and people attached to their sounds, but they are able from a very young age to reproduce those specific sounds.

There is a famous 2009 study of how children even cry with an accent, which was carried out by Professor Kathleen Wermke at the Würzburg University in Germany, together with colleagues. The researchers showed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns and concluded that the French newborns cried with a rising “accent” while the German babies’ cries had a falling inflection.

Then there is Orla, a baby from Liverpool, who went viral on TikTok. In the video, Orla babbles in a Liverpudlian accent as her babysitter, a friend of Orla’s mum, tries to get her to take a nap. At 19 months, Orla can very clearly reproduce sounds before being able to form words while using her family’s intonation.

“It’s important to make parents recognise that any sound a baby is producing is part of his or her way into language,” Wermke told The Guardian. “We should admire that and listen to them – even if they’re sometimes in the mood to cry.”

Forbidden languages

But paying attention to children’s early sounds, as well as fostering them in your native language, is a privilege.

Recently, while I was in Argentina, I was speaking to a contact — a trainee psychologist working at a programme to support caregivers in helping their children’s psychological development — who told me that one mother said she was worried and ashamed to talk to her baby in her indigenous language. Speaking a different language makes you stand out. And while some languages represent colonial power, the power of language also changes according to place. For example, Spanish may be the language of power in a country like Argentina, but speaking Spanish in some communities in the United States is very different.

Throughout human history, people have been threatened, hunted, and killed for speaking a different language. Languages have been forbidden. Parents have been too scared and wary to pass them on to their children. The lullabies they grew up with got lost in between generations. Now they all get drowned out by Cocomelon instead.

I am very aware of privilege whenever people comment on my children’s multilingual upbringing. I speak to them in Italian, my husband, Nacho, who’s from Argentina, speaks to them in Spanish. We live in Greece and the children go to a Greek-English school. So they are growing up with four languages.

Showing our true selves

As I’ve written before, I don’t like people commenting on their languages as an amazing skill. Increasingly, I try to highlight just how lucky they are to be immersed in all this linguistic richness. I hope they will also understand their privilege and be able to find their way in the maze of identities we are bringing to their young lives.

So, why did my spontaneous “sí” bring many tears to my eyes? I am afraid that before making a point of passing my native language to my children, I had for many years tried to eliminate any traces of my upbringing from my conversations. My Italianness was getting in the way, I was ashamed of it. My accent was made fun of in work environments. I was told I would never be a broadcaster. And so I tried my best to suppress it.

Yet, when my voice came out in Italian, and my therapist commented on how surprised she was to hear it in Italian, I recognised a child’s voice in it. I said “sí” like I hear our little one León say it. And that is what moved me deeply, and brought me to tears. I felt that I had not allowed that native language of mine to flow freely in my life. The same way I hope I can work through some of that internal mess I feel, I also hope that we support caregivers to help children feel comfortable in their many languages of origin, so they don’t feel they need to hide their languages — and themselves.

What I’ve been reading

This article gives an overview of results of a new study that shows how maternal brains change during pregnancy — and how some of those changes last even two years after pregnancy. Scientists tracked a 38-year-old woman from before conception until two years after childbirth using detailed MRI scans. They found significant shifts, such as a decrease in grey matter and a peak in neural connectivity during the second trimester. This study leaves a lot of questions unanswered but it is groundbreaking because it opens the door to further studies that could help better understand conditions like postnatal depression.

What I’ve been listening to

Have you heard of the late Italian composer Ennio Morricone, whose oeuvre included the scores of over 400 films. He first came into my life when I was a child through the 1988 Cinema Paradiso, which somehow always brings tears into my eyes, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. One of the most incredible scenes of the film has a very emotional song as a soundtrack. Now, this video shows a children’s choir singing that song in front of Morricone, well in his 80s, and shows how he got emotional by listening to that rendition of his music.

What I’ve been watching

This short reel by UK comedian George Lewis made me laugh out loud: “Dads v mums — feeding your kid in public.” “Is there anything he can’t do?” is the reaction of marvel seeing a father feeding his child in public. Instead the reactions when a mother feeds a child are of disgust. A lot of George Lewis’ feed is quite funny, actually. (And a good relief in a week where I was otherwise talking about a lot of teary things!)

Who’s been inspiring me

Gisèle Pélicot bravely standing up at a court against her husband who drugged her for nearly 10 years, raping her and offering her up for rape to other men on the internet. Her willingness to make the public trial and to show up in the face of those who want to think of her as a victim is definitely redefining what being a survivor means.

Susan Holt Simpson, Unsplash. Wooden alphabet blocks with colorful letters, stacked in a playful arrangement.

The post What language does your inner child speak? appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

When I was little, my mom used to call me Mafalda, after a popular comic strip.

Mafalda was first published on September 29, 1964 — 60 years ago this month. Created by Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, better known as Quino, the comic focuses on an outspoken, precocious child living with her middle class family in Buenos Aires. She has a tortoise that is named Bureaucracy.

Even though I grew up in Naples, the Argentine protagonist’s popularity had crossed the Atlantic.

Not only was I opinionated from an early age, just like 6-year-old Mafalda, but whenever something displeased me, I would go into comic-like wide-open-mouth cries, screaming for whatever I disliked to end immediately. In Mafalda’s case, her deepest hatred was soup!

It is maybe because of this early-day identification that I feel a deep connection toward Mafalda. Or maybe because I later studied international relations, developing similar concerns around humanity and world peace. Or maybe it is because I spent a long time in Latin America, and even married an Argentine, making Buenos Aires my home for several years. It could also be that I now write a lot about early childhood, and Mafalda’s innocent but serious attitude toward world problems is an excellent example of how engaged children can be with their surroundings.

Like Charles Schultz’s Peanuts and the famous Charlie Brown, the comic focuses on a group of characters — but Mafalda is much more political and cynical, but also hopeful.

Mafalda came at a time when Latin America was going through political censorship, with U.S.-supported military dictatorships taking over in several countries over the years when she was published.

Feminism, war, consumerism

Quino, who died in 2020 at the age of 88, managed to overcome the censorship and continue to be published, in part because the censors considered Mafalda to be intended for kids. Yet he stopped publishing in 1973. He said he had run out of ideas and wanted to respect his readers and his creation.

The paramilitary organization known as Triple A raided Quino’s home in 1975, when he refused to let its director use Mafalda for a political campaign. He fled to Milan with his wife in 1976, when the military dictatorship came to power, and only went back to Argentina when it returned to democracy in 1983.

The strips were translated into dozens of languages, especially in Europe. She was quickly distributed in Italy, for example, where I grew up. She is also very popular back in Argentina, where a statue was erected in her honour in San Telmo, the Buenos Aires neighbourhood where she lives in the comic stories. Two of her friends, Manolito and Susanita, were added later. The statue has become a popular tourist attraction, with fans lining up to sit on the bench next to the girl.

What surprises me most is that Mafalda feels incredibly modern and to the point — not only when it comes to the topics she comments on, but also what she says. Feminism, the media, communism and consumerism, war, inequality — Mafalda addresses all these issues with fresh, simple irony.

A Netflix series

According to Spain’s climate-focused magazine Climática, Mafalda could be considered a precursor to the young climate activist that is a mainstay of today’s generation.

There are strips that talk about air pollution and overpopulation as challenges to the world. In another one, she comments on the “sad panorama” of an oil-rich region she is traveling through by train. There is one where she is presumably in Patagonia — a beautiful lake surrounded by evergreens — and she says: “My god! This is so beautiful that men will look at it in postcards in order to spoil it!”

There is also a famous one when she opens the door to her friend Felipito, telling him someone is sick at home and he should be quiet. She then leads his friend to a small bed, where a globe is lying down — and the kids look pensively at it.

She could also be a fourth-wave feminist. She pushes her mother to stop being a housewife (“Mom, what would you like to do if you had a life”, she asks after seeing all the housework her mom does) and tells her friend Susanita that having children is not the only thing a girl should wish for.

Or a peace activist — her questions around the Vietnam War are probably quite similar to the questions my 5-year-old son Lorenzo asks about what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza. And, just like Mafalda’s father struggles to respond, who says children would not understand what war is about, I have a hard time answering, too.

Or a global South activist. In one strip, she realizes how the southern hemisphere is depicted in the globe and says: “But then … we live upside down!” “My word! I think from now on I’ll feel more attached to this ground!”

Given how modern and relevant her outlook is, it is no surprise that Netflix has announced it will launch an animated series directed by Oscar-winning Argentinian director Juan José Campanella (The Secret in Their Eyes), who has been a Mafalda fan since his childhood. Campanella has said he wants to “reconnect new generations who didn’t grow up with Mafalda” and “bring her wit and acuity to kids growing up on digital platforms today.”

Natural questions

What I love most about Mafalda is how she epitomizes children’s natural ability to ask questions, and how revolutionary questioning can be. In one strip, she talks to her baby brother, Guille, who starts by asking why their father is not at home.

“Papa is at work, Guille.”

“Why?”

“Because when people grow up they need to work.”

“Why?”

“Because if they don’t, they can’t buy food or clothes or anything.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s how our world works, Guille.”

“WHY?”

“One and a half and already a candidate for tear gas,” she replies.

*An earlier version of this essay appeared on Worldcrunch, the online news magazine I work for.

What I’ve been reading

This is a great story in Psyche that looks at children’s temperament — you know, something that adults who spend a lot of time around children never cease discussing. The whiney boy versus the active girl, the pensive toddler versus the reactive baby. Samuel Putnam, a developmental psychologist at Bowdoin College in Maine, U.S., together with colleagues, linked differences in temperament to country of upbringing — trying to show that temperament might be shaped not only by one’s DNA or the habits of one’s parents, but also by the broader culture in which a child is raised. The research found some differences between regions, especially when it came to how parents perceived how their children expressed negative feelings, such as fear, discomfort or sadness. In the story, Putnam explains that societal differences, such as individualism vs collectivism, can affect how parents interpret their children’s negative emotions — but that family income also plays a role. It is a great subject that I will tackle in a future newsletter!

What I’ve been listening to

This brief report on NPR’s Goats and Soda looks at children of sex workers, and how invisible their lives are across the world — some are not even registered at birth. In Nigeria, reports Gabrielle Emanuel, sex workers usually have no access to prenatal care, which leads to a lot of health issues. “The issues are overwhelming. I think I’d actually call it a state of emergency,” says Dr. Patrick Ezie, medical director of Silver Cross Hospital in Abuja, Nigeria, which houses a programme for pregnant sex workers and their children, which started in 2023. For example, for mothers who are HIV positive or have syphilis and don’t get access to prenatal care, avoiding transmission to the baby is difficult. “These babies are born struggling,” says Ezie, and their struggle often continues into childhood.

What I’ve been watching

This is a heartbreaking report that gets unprecedented access to major landfills in Syria. After 13 years at war, most of the country’s services have collapsed — trash collection among them. And as people struggle to survive, trash picking is a way to get a livelihood, especially for young children — 43% of whom are not in school. The short film focuses on 11-year-old Abdullah, who spends 12 hours a day in a landfill in Idlib to support his family, mostly searching for copper. But as he searches among old engines, or picks aluminium and plastic, there are also old weapons and medical waste that are particularly hazardous. In 2020, an avalanche of garbage killed three children. In another landfill, outside of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, a family with young children pick among the trash to find food.

What’s been inspiring me

I will not presume the right
to give you a name
but I can, at least, recognize
that you once had one.

I am an avid reader of Sapiens, an editorially independent anthropology magazine, and I really appreciate some of the work they published. This excerpt is from a poem by Jenny L. Davis, a poet-anthropologist of the Chickasaw Nation, who honoured the infant remains historically used in teaching collections at the University of Illinois.

Gustavo Sánchez on Unsplash, The image shows two statues of cartoon characters sitting on a white, slightly worn bench. The character on the right has a round face, black hair with a bow, and is dressed in a green outfit. The character on the left has large, fluffy yellow hair and a more casual look, with a black vest over a white shirt. In the background, a person on a motorbike and a street with shops and restaurants are slightly blurred, giving a city atmosphere. The statues appear playful and are likely part of a public art display.

The post A very modern 70s cartoon appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

I grew up in a family where sport was not actively promoted. My mother was an only child, raised by her single aunts, and she was discouraged from doing sports. My dad, who went to military school, tried all sorts of sports before dedicating himself full-time to Trotskyism and political activity — it was 1968, after all. He eventually decreed that sport was a waste of time, and that football, in particular, was the opium of the masses, paraphrasing Marx’s statement about religion. So, in a city where Argentine star Diego Armando Maradona was inspiring people to dream big dreams, I grew up as a brainy girl in a brainy household that condemned the national sport as something beneath us.

At school the situation was not better. Southern Italy is infamous for its lack of infrastructure — only 3 schools out of ten have a gym in southern Italy nowadays, and things may have been even worse 25 years ago. My high school was located in the very heart of Naples old town, in a former Jesuit convent dating back to the 1500s. We used to exercise once a week in the Oratorio dei Nobili, a beautifully large hall, with its frescoed ceilings depicting religious scenes. In the centre, there was a grandiose framed fresco of the Nativity of Mary by Battistello Caracciolo, one of the city’s most important 17th century painters.

I was not so impressed by the art, to be honest, as I struggled keeping up with the PE classes that I hated. We would run around the hall, and maybe do some coordination exercises. I would feel clumsy and unprepared. What I know is that at some point, students were barred from doing sport in the Oratorio dei Nobili, because our sweat was ruining the prized frescos.

My struggles with sport

I had no role models — nobody around me did sports seriously, especially not girls. The slimmest girls around me were mostly encouraged to do gymnastics or ballet, while the boys were sent to football practice. My mother was actually a big fan of basketball, and when she could, for a couple of years when I was in middle school, she sent my brother and me to basketball as an extracurricular activity. Only when I was 16 I discovered I could swim in a swimming pool, and enjoy it. In the meantime, I struggled with my weight, with being bullied for being chubby and also with my endless energy.

When I left Italy for university in Scotland, I met friends who exercised regularly — they jogged, they cycled, they swam. I started running and doing yoga — which are still part of my (sometimes) daily routine, and which definitely helped me channel my stress and feel better about myself.

When in 2017 I started covering women’s football for a journalistic project that took me and two colleagues to Brazil, The Gambia, Denmark and the United States, those who knew me were surprised. What was I, of all people, doing covering sports?

But to me it was clear that the society that was still preventing girls around the world from chasing their sport dream was the same structure that had prevented me from exploring exercise more widely. I understood their struggles — and I thought everybody else should understand them too.

Even Brazilian professional footballer Marta, who is widely regarded as one of the greatest female footballers of all time and was named FIFA World Player of the Year six times, had to sneak out of her house and play with boys. Female football was illegal until 1979, and Marta, who was born in 1986, still met a lot of societal resistance.

“I was very frustrated. I looked around, I stopped to think, and I just couldn’t understand it,” she told me and my colleagues. “Why is it so hard to accept that a human being was born with a talent, knows how to play, wants to do it and that is what makes her happy?”

Women at the Olympics

I am thinking of women in sports because the 2024 Olympics made history: for the first time, there was the same representation of female and male athletes. This is a major step in the right direction (women first participated in the international games in 1900, representing just 2.2% of athletes). And other great steps in the right direction have been taken, like for example having the first-ever Olympic Village nursery for mothers to spend time with their young children. We have also seen heavily pregnant athletes competing, such as Egypt’s fencer Nada Hafez and Azerbaijani archer Yaylagul Ramazanova — a sign that ideas around what the female body can accomplish even in pregnancy are changing.

Yet, there is still so much to do.

While women’s sports have more audiences than ever, and also more money, the growth is still slow. A 2023 report commissioned by a women’s sport and entertainment collective found that 90% of sponsorships still go to men’s sports. This also has an effect on how far women dream about being athletes. A 2023 study by Women in Sport found that the lack of funding impacted career choices — less than 29% of girls and young women aged 13-24 said they dreamt of reaching the top in sport compared to over 50% of boys and young men.

As Jessica Pinchbeck and Candice Lingam-Willgoss, lecturers in sport and fitness at The Open University argue in this piece, very little is known about how to support female athletes as it is more complex to study them because of the hormone fluctuations. Not to mention how to support pregnant or postpartum athletes.

A misinformation shitstorm

And then there is the issue of how women’s sport is perceived and talked about.

Take the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who won gold medal in the women’s boxing 66-kilogram weight class, despite being at the centre of a huge controversy and misinformation shitstorm around her gender identity.

During Khelif’s preliminary match against Italy’s Angela Carini, a blow by the Algerian athlete resulted in Carini abandoning the fight after 46 seconds. “I’ve never been hit with such a powerful punch,” Carini told reporters after the match. That comment was transformed into a viral misinformation campaign.

At the 2023 International Boxing Association (IBA) Women’s World Championships, officials had disqualified Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, saying that the women “did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

The Internet went wild. People I considered smart in my circles shared infuriating posts saying that Khelif was a trans athlete (she is not, she is a woman), insinuating that the Olympics are a joke for not checking on athletes, and so on and so forth. (Khelif eventually filed a criminal complaint over alleged “acts of cyber-harassment” to the Paris public prosecutor’s office, mentioning famous figures such as JK Rowling and Elon Musk, who misrepresented Khelif’s gender.)

I recommend you read this piece by Jaime Schultz, author of the book “Regulating Bodies” to understand more about the testing of testosterone and how it affects women athletes unjustly. “Most sports are organized according to a strict male-female binary. Nature isn’t,” she writes.

I also recommend that you read this piece about Khelif’s childhood, and how hard it was for her, as a girl, to be interested in playing football and eventually ending up as a boxer — a sport that is not considered apt for women in conservative environments.

There were also a lot of other difficult moments at the Olympics. Male commentators came under fire for their sexist comments. A Eurosport commentator was suspended for suggesting female swimmers were off fixing their makeup. Another commentator from France’s RMC radio talked about a top tennis player as a housewife. “On the left, there’s Sara Errani, who’s the boss. She does everything: The washing up, the cooking, the mopping up.”

Female elite athletes keep being referred to as “girls” or addressed by their first names — unlike men. The official Olympics broadcaster had to warn camera operators not to film or frame female athletes in sexist ways.

“It is unfortunate that far too often, attention is paid more on how women athletes look, versus their power, grit and performance,” Danette Leighton, CEO of the New York-based nonprofit Women’s Sports Foundation, told Al Jazeera.

Yet one image speaks volumes: U.S. gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowed down to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who won the gold for the individual floor exercise final. It speaks of camaraderie, of respect, of overcoming struggles (this was the first all-black podium in men or women’s gymnastics at the Olympics). It is an image I wish I had seen growing up because it would have told me about all the reasons why sport is great and makes us grow and develop. It would have given me an ideal to follow — the way it inspires young children right now.

What I’ve been reading

“Has your husband ever gotten anyone pregnant before?” A routine question asked by a doctor helping a woman figure out the reasons for her infertility. In this touching, first-person account (from the Modern Love column of The New York Times), a secret opens the door to new possibilities along a difficult path towards motherhood.

What I’ve been listening to

This is a great episode from People Fixing the World, a BBC programme that focuses on solutions to the world’s problems. It looks at what solutions there are to support premature babies around the world — especially in countries where incubators are not available. Doctors in Colombia are teaching mothers to look after their babies like kangaroos do. The so-called “kangaroo mother care” teaches mothers to wrap babies tightly against their skin. The technique has been used in Bogotá since the late 1970s and it has saved babies and helped them thrive.

What I’ve been watching

“How did I come to the idea that my parental leave would be a sort of sabbatical?” This question in this beautiful short animation called Postpartum really touched me. German filmmaker Henriette Rietz tries to unpack the complicated and overwhelming days after her child is born. She talks of pain, sleepless days (day becomes night, night becomes day), of endless breastfeeding, of false expectations and external pressures. The animation is sweet and ironic — and the images it brings to the idea of new motherhood are refreshing and beautiful.

What’s been inspiring me

These words, by Lisa Buscomb of the New Zealand-based account Wilde Road, reached me on a day I was struggling with my to do list, before trying to take some days off. “Some days just don’t go to plan, you feel behind and a little lost,” she writes. “But it’s okay. Everyone has these days.” It reminded me to take a breath, to take some rest, to be kinder to myself. I hope they do the trick with you too. Thank you María José for sharing.

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo credits and alt-text: Ian Murray on Unsplash, Close-up of a gold medal with a red and white ribbon lying on a wooden surface, with a blurred natural background.

The post Motherhood and medals appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.

There is a poem that has always stayed with me.

It’s by acclaimed Italian writer Gianni Rodari and it’s called “Ferragosto”, after the Italian public holiday that falls on August 15. It’s about children who can’t afford to go on vacation. I can’t find an English translation, and I am not a literary translator, so I’ll summarise the end of the poem: it envisions a government that provides free trips to the sea and mountains for all children.

The poem made an impression on me as a child because I was well aware of how lucky I was to have vacations and to be able to travel. My parents owned a camper van, and we spent long summers driving through Greece and Turkey, learning about different ways of life and languages. I knew this set me apart from others in my public school because I had classmates who couldn’t even afford a day trip to the beach (and I grew up in the outskirts of Naples, on the Mediterranean Sea), while others had holiday homes somewhere in southern Italy and went back to the same place every year.

My long vacations were possible because my mother worked as a teacher and my father worked as a freelance engineer and could organise his time off.

But they also had a second job, which was buying everyday-use objects and antiques around the world and then selling them at markets — so our vacations were also opportunities for them to work and for us to trail behind them in dusty markets and poorly lit antique shops around Turkey and eastern Europe.

How summer vacation can widen inequality

But the type of summers I had were by no means the norms.

The truth is that long school vacations are completely out-of-sync with modern-day society. With two working parents, nuclear families in small apartments in cities, and increasingly hot summers, the question of what to do with kids in summer becomes more complicated.

Countries like Italy have among the longest school vacations in Europe (11 to 13 consecutive weeks depending on the region). But many other countries in Europe have more than 12 weeks holidays for primary and secondary education, including Ireland, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Albania, and Iceland, according to EU data. This differs significantly from countries like Denmark, the Netherlands, France and some Swiss cantons, where there are *only* around eight weeks off.

Early childhood education (for children up until the age of five) usually involves shorter vacations — in some countries, nurseries or daycare centres are open all year round, or only shut down for a few weeks. This is because there is an understanding that young children need continuous supervision and they cannot be left to parents who need to work.

But what about six or seven year olds? How many parents have more than a month of vacation to look after them? They can alternate vacations if there are two parents, or maybe they have grandparents around, or they can afford summer camps. But what if none of these options are available?

That is when inequality increases — only families who can afford it go travelling or engage in learning activities, while others are forced to use screens as babysitters. This has effects on children’s cognitive abilities, mental health, and on their physical health too, as they become more sedentary. Even in the UK, where summer vacations are about six weeks long, summer vacations may widen health and educational inequalities for children living in poverty.

Priced out of vacation

Having time off with the family can create great opportunities for children’s brain development, much like unstructured play and exploration do on a daily basis, as Margot Sunderland, a British child psychotherapist, argues in this article in The Telegraph. She refers to research by Jaak Panksepp, the late neuroscientist at Washington State University, who wrote extensively about the benefits of play.

But there is no need for distant travel for that, nor is travel necessary to have time to relax with children. If the parents are stressed (because the vacation is expensive or because they are stuck in an airport for several days), then the potential for family bonding decreases too.

And making vacations a tenet for middle class life can bring a lot of stress. Rodari may have written “Ferragosto” in the 1950s, some seventy years ago, but holidays are still unaffordable to lots of middle class families in the Global North. Research in Italy shows that three families with small children out of ten cannot afford to go on vacation, while recent data by the IELKA Institute in Greece, which surveys consumer goods trade, says that one in two Greeks will not go on vacation this year — too many foreign tourists have made travel unaffordable for Greeks. In the U.S., a 2021 survey found that nearly half of travellers were likely or definitely going to take on debt to fund summer travel, with millennials and parents of younger children more likely to incur debt.

Alternatives to vacation

But what alternatives do we have as parents when our young children are out of school and they are too young to be able to entertain themselves? If you are lucky enough to have family around, then you may have grandparents willing to help while you work. (But beware, because grandparents can also burn out when they become the only childcare option that parents have.)

Otherwise, you need to have enough money to spend on childcare or summer camps. In Italy, as this article in Domani newspaper points out, summer camps cost between 100 and 220 euros per week per child. That is a huge sum, if you multiply it for at least eight weeks. In the United States, besides being very expensive, there is the added pressure of summer camps being hard to get into too, as there is a lot of competition.

Around the world, some schools are experimenting with summer opening hours. In Italy, there is a project to keep schools open in summer, but it is aimed at older children and it is mainly to fight against the summer learning loss — children who are not at school unlearn a lot of their academic knowledge. In the Netherlands, some schools remain open 50 weeks of the year, and parents (and students) choose when they go on holiday.

I do understand why so many countries in the Mediterranean have long vacations — with outdated infrastructure, public schools may not be able to offer children the right conditions to stay cool, as heat waves last longer. And many cities in the southern Mediterranean are far from child-friendly — especially in the heat.

But governments should have public policies in place for this total mismatch between parents’ working life and children’s school times. This is not to say that school years should be longer, or that teachers should work more, or that education should replace care — or be confused with care. It is really about putting the idea of care at the centre of our policies so that long summers are not only a burden for parents.

So, let me go back to my own version of Rodari’s poem, which is less romantic but a lot more realistic: let’s give children a chance to have subsidised summer camps and paid holidays, or at least give parents more of a chance to be with them over the summer — with more flexible schedules, and some financial compensation.

*I published an earlier version of this essay in 2022.

What I’ve been reading

This article looks at a study on how children are helping teach AI about language. Researchers at New York University trained an AI model on 61 hours of video from a helmet camera worn by a child in Australia. The child, called Sam, used the camera off and on for one and a half years — from the time he was six months old until a little after his second birthday. The camera caught the things Sam looked at and paid attention while he was awake and registered the words that were spoken by Sam and the adults around him. The study concluded that the AI managed to match words to objects, but it lacked the complexity of children’s full language abilities. What’s really fascinating is that future research aims to enhance AI by incorporating elements of human learning, such as parents’ gaze, in language learning.

What I’ve been listening to

Greek singer Marina Satti, who is of Greek-Sudanese descent, released a song ‘Ah, Thalassa’ (‘Oh, Sea), in partnership with UNHCR, which she dedicated to children refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean.

Without love
I don’t want to live here on land
But you are so calm my sea
Mirroring birds
But I am a wave…

The video clip shows a Greek beach behind a barbed wire, in contrast with families playing with their children, enjoying their swim. We also see life jackets and remnants from castaways, and some clothes and other objects on the bottom of the sea.

What I’ve been watching

This short documentary film by Kern Hendricks at Undark looks at how Palestinian youth are being affected by the war — and what the toll of trauma in their lives is. Even before the war in Gaza started last October, The World Bank, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and other organisations found in 2022 that more than half of Palestinian adults in the West Bank and Gaza suffered from depression, which is about 10 times higher than the global average. But the report did not take into account children and under-18s, who make up nearly half of the population in the region. Filmed in the West Bank, the documentary looks at how fear and anxiety are part of the daily emotional landscape for children and families living under occupation.

What’s been inspiring me

This picture of U.S. gymnasts Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles bowing down to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade, who won the gold for the individual floor exercise final, makes me incredibly happy. It is not only wonderful to see the act of sisterhood in action, but it is also special because the trio made history as the first all-black podium in men or women’s gymnastics at the Olympics. Andrade is an amazing gymnast who lived in poverty growing up and has an incredibly inspiring story. More of this, please, and of great women stories in sport.

With love and care, 
Irene

The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.

Photo credits and alt-text: engin akyurt on Unsplash, Children’s beach toys scattered on the sand, including a blue bucket, a yellow sieve, a green mold, and a blue scoop.

The post What to do with kids in the summer? appeared first on The First 1,000 Days.