This story is from March 10, 2024
Italy is known for its devoted mammas. Emperor Nero’s maneuvered him into the line of succession. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi brought his on the campaign trail. Footballer Christian Vieri called his five times a day.
Yet refusing to buy into the cult of maternity are Italian women themselves. What’s turning them off may be precisely the burden of the myth: “Mothers are required to give these children their total attention,” said Valeria Merlini, a restorer of Renaissance paintings in her late 50s who lives in Rome. “If you think too hard about having kids you may simply give up.”
Many now are doing just that. Merlini was one of four. She had two children of her own. And those children, both in their 30s, don’t yet have any children themselves. That generational pattern maps onto a wider demographic trend, with the country’s fertility rate in decline since the mid-1960s. As of the most recent data, Italy was one of the nations with the lowest birth rates in the world at 1.24 per woman – well below the level needed, in economists’ terms, for the population to sustain itself without immigration. That compares with a fertility rate of 1.8 in neighbouring France where President Emmanuel Macron recently fretted that the country needs to take action against a demographic time bomb.
The low birthrate has consequences beyond undermining Italy’s most-venerated institution. It’s showing in the rising national debt, which has in the past few years ballooned close to 140% of output. In terms of the OECD’s so-called “old-age dependency ratio,” which measures the number of people of working age sustaining those aged 65 and over, only Japan is in a worse position.
Yet refusing to buy into the cult of maternity are Italian women themselves. What’s turning them off may be precisely the burden of the myth: “Mothers are required to give these children their total attention,” said Valeria Merlini, a restorer of Renaissance paintings in her late 50s who lives in Rome. “If you think too hard about having kids you may simply give up.”
Many now are doing just that. Merlini was one of four. She had two children of her own. And those children, both in their 30s, don’t yet have any children themselves. That generational pattern maps onto a wider demographic trend, with the country’s fertility rate in decline since the mid-1960s. As of the most recent data, Italy was one of the nations with the lowest birth rates in the world at 1.24 per woman – well below the level needed, in economists’ terms, for the population to sustain itself without immigration. That compares with a fertility rate of 1.8 in neighbouring France where President Emmanuel Macron recently fretted that the country needs to take action against a demographic time bomb.
The low birthrate has consequences beyond undermining Italy’s most-venerated institution. It’s showing in the rising national debt, which has in the past few years ballooned close to 140% of output. In terms of the OECD’s so-called “old-age dependency ratio,” which measures the number of people of working age sustaining those aged 65 and over, only Japan is in a worse position.
end of article