I took our six kids overseas — and saw a ‘family-friendly’ nation in joyous action

Right before Thanksgiving, I spent a week in Greece with my husband and our six kids.

If you’ve ever wanted to feel like a celebrity, turning heads everywhere you go, I recommend taking a gaggle of children to a country with a plunging birth rate. 

Across the European Union, birth rates are far below replacement level — and Greece is among the lowest, with the average woman having 1.3 children in her lifetime.

Touring it with six kids made me feel like I was traveling with a circus troupe. 

Everywhere we went, people stared.

They counted the children aloud (I learned the number six in Greek, éxi,  because I heard so many people tallying how many kids we had). 

They smiled politely and encouragingly, but with a kind of stunned disbelief.

Greece’s birth rate has collapsed so dramatically that a family like mine, once utterly normal, now looks like a moving museum exhibit.

“Look — children,” the locals might as well have been saying.

“A relic of the past.” 

Then we flew to Israel. It’s only a short hop on the map, but culturally it felt like crossing a continent.

Suddenly, we weren’t an oddity: We were — wonderfully, refreshingly — unremarkable.

In Israel, where the birth rate is not just stable but rising, a family with six kids isn’t an act of rebellion.

Walking around Jerusalem, no one turns to gawk because families with three to even eight children are everywhere.

Babies in carriers, toddlers on shoulders, siblings zipping ahead on scooters; the streets are alive with them.

This isn’t a place where children are squeezed into the seams of adult life.

They are the fabric.

Tim Carney, who has written extensively about the cultural differences between America and Israel, saw the same thing when reporting for his book “Family Unfriendly.” 

In interviews, he describes a society where kids are simply part of public life.

“There’s a general free-range-ness of Israeli kids,” he noted to Jewish Insider. 

One Israeli parent, struggling with the right phrasing in English, told him: “Here you don’t need to raise your own children.”

Carney saw sixth-graders rollerblading around Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square on a Sunday night, with no adults hovering.

I saw it myself.

When we visited a friend who lives in a high-rise in a bustling city, she casually sent her 8-year-old down to the park across the street to show us the way into the building. 

At a fancy restaurant in Jerusalem, I watched a baby crawl across the floor beside a large family gathering — and no one scolded the parents.

The child wasn’t an intruder in an adult space; the child was part of the space.

Contrast that with America, where bringing a baby to a restaurant can spark the kind of outrage or judgment usually reserved for child abusers.

In the United States, having six kids often feels like trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

You’re swimming upstream in a culture that no longer knows what to do with children, and often doesn’t want to try.

In Israel, many things are difficult, but having six kids isn’t one of them.

When I’ve gotten on and off buses with my brood — ages 2 to 12 — strangers have stepped forward to help without hesitation.

Older passengers chat with my kids, not because they’re impressed but because this is normal, and because they actually — gasp — like children. 

That’s what a healthy society looks like.

In America, I’m careful not to be too disruptive with my family; in Israel, I don’t feel like an inconvenience.

I’m not bracing for judgment. I’m not worried that my kids will be treated as a public nuisance. 

Israelis understand something we’ve forgotten — that children are not carbon-emitting inconveniences, but the clearest sign that a society believes in its future.

Carney’s research points to a powerful truth: Family-friendly cultures produce families.

America’s birth rate is collapsing because we’ve built a society that treats families as burdens — economically, socially, culturally, even morally. 

We’ve made parenting a solitary endurance test instead of a shared community project.

We’ve treated children as interruptions to “real life” instead of the point of it.

Greece showed me what that looks like when taken to its extreme: a nation slowly realizing it has no one left to hand itself to.

Israel, though, shows what results when families are baked into the foundation: a society that keeps going, because the next generation is right there in front of you, rollerblading through it.

America doesn’t need to become Israel.

But we do need to remember that children are not the problem; they are the solution.

And a country that forgets that won’t just lose population.

It will lose its soul.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.