There’s a moment in the third Mia’s Adventures book where everything just… stops making sense. The signs are in a different language. The food on the table doesn’t look like anything Mia’s had before. Even the buildings, beautiful as they are, feel like they belong to someone else’s story, not hers.

For a page or two, Mia just stands there. Overwhelmed.

I think a lot of adults forget how often kids feel exactly that way. We talk about “new experiences” like they’re automatically exciting, but for a child, new often just means unfamiliar, and unfamiliar can feel like standing at the edge of a pool that’s deeper than you expected. A new school. A new classroom with new faces. A new sport, a new neighborhood, a new kid sitting at what used to be your table at lunch. None of it comes with an instruction manual, and kids know it.

So when Mia lands in Italy and feels that same shaky uncertainty, not knowing the words, not recognizing the food, not sure how anything works, I wanted that to feel real. Not like a postcard. Like an actual gut-drop moment.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Mia doesn’t fix the unfamiliarity by understanding everything first. She doesn’t wait until she’s fluent in Italian or until the menu makes perfect sense. She just… starts. She asks a question. She tries the food, even when she can’t pronounce its name and ends up mangling it a little. She lets herself stand in front of the Trevi Fountain and just look, really look, without needing to know its whole history first.

And slowly, the unfamiliar starts to soften. Not because the world got smaller or simpler, but because Mia got a little braver, a little more curious, one small moment at a time.

I think that’s the real lesson hiding in this book, and it applies just as much to a kid starting middle school in their hometown as it does to a kid landing in Rome for the first time. The world doesn’t become less new by avoiding it. It becomes less scary by engaging with it. Asking the question instead of staying quiet. Trying the unfamiliar thing instead of sticking only to what’s safe. Letting yourself be amazed, even when you don’t fully understand what you’re looking at yet.

That’s a skill, by the way, not just a personality trait some kids have and others don’t. Curiosity can be modeled. It can be encouraged. And honestly, it can be practiced, the same way Mia practices it, one unfamiliar moment at a time.

So if there’s a child in your life who’s about to walk into something new: a first day, a first trip, a first anything, maybe the goal isn’t to make it feel familiar before they go. Maybe it’s just to remind them that they don’t have to understand the whole world to step into it.

They just have to stay curious enough to take the next step. The rest tends to follow.