We left our 7- and 9-year-old kids alone while we went out to dinner in a foreign country. It was one of the best decisions we've made.

• The thought of taking our tired kids out to a dinner they likely wouldn't enjoy wasn't appealing.
• Instead, we left them in our rental armed with devices, made sure they were safe, and set out.
• This experience allowed us to embrace our kids' independence once we were back home too.

It was the summer of 2022 when my family of four descended, via bus and train, from the relatively temperate and isolated peaks of Switzerland into a hot, crowded, Italian summer. My Pacific Northwest children, then 7 and 9, were not built to handle heat. When I pulled out my camera on a crowded ferry my daughter let her head loll back and moaned, "Document my misery!"

They recovered slightly when they ate their first real Italian pizza for lunch. But when it came time for dinner, no one wanted to leave the sanctuary of our air-conditioned Airbnb rental. I didn't know what to do. I had to eat something but I felt exhausted at just the thought of coaxing the kids through walking into town, searching for a ristorante-pizzeria — the only acceptable choice — that could seat us, and then waiting for our food with them.

As it happened, there was a restaurant on the ground floor of where we were staying, but it wasn't a pizzeria. I knew our very picky eaters wouldn't touch anything on the menu.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the time we'd spent in Switzerland watching our friends' kids walk themselves to school, head out to the store, and navigate a complex train system without help. Maybe we were just sick of the kids. Whatever it was, my husband had an idea:

"We could just leave them here," he suggested cautiously.

If we'd been home in Seattle, I would have flatly rejected him. I would have said something like, "Good parents don't leave their kids unattended."

But they say travel lets you become a different person, just for a few days. So maybe that's why instead I said, "If we give them their tablets, they literally will not move."

"There's leftover pizza from lunch," my husband pointed out. "We could just heat that up for them here."

We fed them the leftovers, handed them their tablets, made them practice unlocking the door (but not for strangers!), and warned them not to eat any food lest they choke. My husband and I went downstairs and had a peaceful dinner looking out over the sparkling waters of Lake Como.

It was glorious

When we returned to our rental, as predicted, the kids had not moved an inch. We felt like we'd gotten away with something, and also like we'd all just passed some sort of parenting test. The kids reported not feeling scared or abandoned at all. There was no reason not to do it again.

And we did, venturing out a few blocks away the next night, and many of the nights that followed as we wound our way through Italy.

Our perspective changed at home

"You know what's crazy," I said at a leisurely dinner along a piazza in Rome, feeling not at all rushed, not needing to apologize for my boisterous American kids. "We would never do this at home, and yet we're totally fine doing it in a country where they have no local knowledge and they don't even speak the language."

"Maybe we should do it at home, then," my husband said.

And that's exactly what we did, similarly tentatively, with frequent check-ins and warnings to help ease any anxiety on our part or theirs. We stopped letting some vague sense of what we were supposed to do direct our parenting, and started living our life in a way that made sense for us. Now we assess the situation and make a decision based on what we think our family is capable of.

In the years since then we look for opportunities to encourage our kids' independence and ability to be self-sufficient. So far they've risen to the occasion. My son, now 12, in particular, likes it when I can send him to the corner store on his electric scooter to pick up some forgotten ingredient I need for dinner. When I watch him pull out of the driveway, perched on his silly scooter seat, his helmet atop his head, you could almost imagine he's on a Vespa, heading out on a solo adventure through the Tuscan countryside.