A Longer Leash

"No, mommy, no…. give me one more chance….one more chance…one more chance!!!" 

Emily and I take a sick pleasure when it's not our kid. We just looked up from our laptops and delicious Greek lunch. looked at each other and said, "Not ours…"

But the scene was hard to ignore as the American mother had to practically drag her little boy back to their hotel room at the resort next to the restaurant where we sat. The boy was tantruming at the top of his lungs and after they made it around the bend, we heard the mom saying "You never hit me! Do you understand, you never, ever hit me again!" The boy's tantrum – at least to the remote beach-diner's ear – went on for about 10 minutes. Every now and then, Emily and I glanced at one another, poured some cold water, had a sip and went back to work with the a quiet sense of relief and validation.

That same mother and son were at the gym today when Emily was working out. The son was taking a private kid workout class while the mom did her workout. Emily liked what she saw and we're considering arranging for the same class for Sennen and Ailyn. Then we ran into the mom and son later in the day in the Skala town square – the boy is five, an only child and the family lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Our kids began playing with him while we talked with the mom.

"Do you have any other kids, or is he your only?" I asked.

"He's our only," she said. "He's enough."

"We have seen a number of families with three or more kids here and they seem so calm and together. I'm always amazed," I said.

"Most of them have help."

"There's this one Swiss family we've seen on the beach several time with three young boys and the mom is cool as a cucumber. I think the boys must be very well behaved because she is always so calm."

"Oh, them – no, they have LOTS of help. Sometimes you see the nanny come by. She's not doing it all by herself."

And we got several brief examples of families with help either in the form of a nanny, relatives or family friends. Again, it was very validating.

Looking around the island, there are other families with kids, but not a huge proportion of the tourist population. Yesterday at Agriolivadi Beach we noticed that aside from the aforementioned serene Swiss family, there were only maybe two or three other families with kids. The majority of people at the taverna were above 60 and when a birthday cake came out and everyone began to sing, it was for a Angela Merckel-ish German woman a few years younger than our parents. Only one beach – Kampos – has a significant young family population and even then, there are plenty of 50-70 year-old old folks laying around, reading books, enjoying cold drinks. I felt bad Sunday at Kampos when we were given lounge chairs next to a 60ish woman who looked very relaxed with her book before our kids showed up asking for this and that – upset to wait for sunscreen, needing their sand toys and hounding us for apricots. But then I thought that before having kids, we tended not to frequent Kampos for just that reason. There has to be somewhere for the yappy kid set….

Nadia, the mother of Raquel who the kids recently befriended and who sadly left the island last night, came to Patmos with her three kids – 7, 14 and 16 – without her husband who was home, busy with work. However, her good friend's family is from Patmos and convinced her to come. So the friend and her kids – similarly aged to her older two – were around the entire time, and they visited a lot with the friend's family and their friends. Nadia's kids seemed pretty independent except for Raquel. 

"Raquel, she's so easy. She's sweet and kind as can be. Other children always love her and she makes friends easily wherever we go. They all want to be with her. She's never a bother. It's my older two who are shitheads – they're difficult and antisocial. I hope the people in the village aren't sick of them," Nadia said with impressive candor.

But shitheads or not, Nadia was very cool with her kids. Her oldest wanted to go meet a friend on another part of the island and came to her for taxi money. She asked him why he wasn't taking the bus (the one public bus that goes around the island) and he explained how long the wait was. She gave him the taxi money and sent him on his way.

"I would NEVER let him do it at home – the taxi or the bus. I'd be afraid he'd be kidnapped or killed or something. But if you're going to give your kids some slack, this is the place to do it."

It was hard to disagree. Nowhere is perfectly safe and bad people are everywhere. But Patmos is small, you can only arrive or exit by ferry a few times a day and the people all know everyone. There's strong community values and cohesion. It's sort of the Mayberry of Greece. With even the water so calm and shallow at the beaches, we've taken to giving our kids more slack. They can swim out a little further without their swim donuts and even further with. They can walk further down the beach that we would ever let them at home. And if someone runs ahead down one of the streets in-town (the ones without cars), it's fine. Nadia's right – you can't keep your kids in a vice grip and if not Patmos, where can you let go? Especially when you see the local children running around town on their own without any family member nearby.

The kids are doing well with the freedom. They play happily and have become more independent, especially at the beach. Our only real snag is when Sennen hears a motor scooter engine, panics and hits the wall of the nearest house or building – often without realizing that the scooter he fears isn't even heading his way. It can make it hard to get from here to there since motor scooters are the dominant form of transportation on Patmos and the only vehicle allowed into the otherwise pedestrian streets of Skala. Teaching Sennen how to cope with motor scooter traffic remains a work in progress.

Luckily, after just a couple of weeks, our kids are becoming recognized by the community. Most of the shop owners on the bottom of our hill say hi to them each day as we pass by, often yelling "Yassou" or giving high fives. The nearest gyro restaurant owner's four-year-old son rides his bike around the square near the restaurant and exchanges funny faces with Ailyn. They never speak, but they do make one another laugh. The more the community is aware of them and likes them, the more protection the kids get – which makes it even easier to loosen the reins.

That of course doesn't make everything easy and carefree. We haven't had tantrums like we heard from the boy from New York, but we also get our fair share of challenging moments – when the food takes too long to come, or bug bites itch or it's not someone's turn to choose the next book on the iPad. Our kids are still kids and we operate more like the Swiss family where the help we get is a big piece of what creates the sanity. 

But the unexpected lesson of this trip thus far is that we have always assumed that the exposure to other cultures, places and ways of life are the biggest value to our kids. It turns out that one aspect of that can be simply recognizing safety and allowing independence. Being free to swim a little further not only makes for happier kids and parents, but it helps us all grow. Most of the places we have been and are likely to go in life probably won't afford us that luxury. There's no letting go in Bangkok or even walking the sometimes chaotic and tourist packed streets of Ubud, Bali alone. But now we know what a beautiful thing letting go can be and we're grateful to Patmos for letting everyone breathe.