This afternoon there was a meeting from 3-5 pm at my son's school for all the parents. For the first hour they discussed plans for field trips, answered questions about new methodology, classroom routine, etc, and the second hour the teacher spoke to the (mostly) mothers about how their children were doing.

Do you know what really surprised me? Many of the mothers brought their children and they were all left to play UNSUPERVISED outside the school. Mostly they ran around, tried to climb a tree, ran across the street (!) to the bar for an ice cream etc. I could never picture this happening in my old USA town!!! A few seven year-olds were even watching their younger siblings out there. Actually it was nice to see that no one was worried (but me ), and luckily, no one fell out of the tree!! A real plus for small town Italy life. Dante had a ball

Diana,
same thing happened to me a week ago.
All kids were out, we were in discussing and talking and electing the class rapresentative.
We have a vaste fenced garden around school. And all kids were playing out. Trees and the like.

I found myself thinking how lucky we are in these small areas where all this can be handled without too much worries. I bet in Roma and Milano it is another story.

Lucky us.

Actually, not. Well, at least thirty years ago it was not, ans to thiss day schools' gardens are still conidered safe: as safe as public gardens (which are just as safe as they were when I was a child).

One side though: taking part to the meetings is (or used to be something) that was not done by accident. Bit by bit we were encouraged to take first passive (listening) than active part to these meetings. My parents stopped taking part to the meetings when I was about 17, since than all decisions were made by me. The same went for most of my schoolmates. We were in charge.