ditemi, assure me, put me in writing that this time the nurseries will comeas declared with great pomp thanks to the funds of the Pnrr: I’ve been waiting for a good part of my life.
Danda Santini director of “iO Donna” (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
Daughter number one, year 1989there was still a strong prejudice that small children had to stay with their mothers to grow up well. I surrendered to a babysitterto which I then entrusted, for convenience, son number two when number one was ready for kindergarten.
I introduced myself to son number three at the new municipal nursery school where they pointed out to me that, since both parents (we) were employees, and therefore certainly billionaires (we still spoke in lire), the place, although “large family” (for three children!), would have gone to children with unemployed mothers.
When the first granddaughter was born, in full Covid, waiting lists were impossible and once again the babysitter was the only lifesaver. But the conditions were very different from mine: a legal babysitter eats up all the salary of a new mother at the first level of employment.
Thirty years ago my salary as a recent college graduate was worth more than double that of a legal babysitter. Today, the rent or the mortgage absorb almost all of the salary of a newly hired father. Thirty years ago, our first rent-fair apartment weighed reasonably on the accumulation of our two salaries.
Today, accounts in hand, a young couple’s budget is bursting. Result: at the age of thirty a little ant like me didn’t really feel like the queen of Sheba but not even in check, economically speaking.
Today, with the arrival of granddaughter number two, it is the grandparents still at work who subsidize the nursery school of number one, naturally private because there is no place in the municipal one for the children of two working parents (you already have heard, right?). Cost per month: 900 euros from 9.30 to 16.30.
Once upon a time, it is true, children arrived, even in extreme conditions. “They came”: they were a blessing or an accident, as the case may be.
Today, when it comes to choice, more and more women and men cannot afford it, accounts in hand. They wait, they postpone, they take the risk of arriving late.
Despite, as this one and all the newspapers and all the economists and studies have shown ad nauseum, a country where women work sees GDP growand if women work more easily they can afford a baby if they want.
And yet, for a good chunk of my life, we’ve been hanging around daycare, making promises, and nothing ever happens. And it’s really unbearable that it’s still like this, despite the important figures brought into play by the Pnrr to finally guarantee the necessary 264,000 new places in public nursery schools.
My alarm won’t make a sound. However, the too many resignations of mothers do it when the first and often only child arrives, because the nests are missing. 65 percent of women who leave their jobs, and with it protections, contributions and guarantees for themselves and their children, do so because family care has sucked them in.
Illustration by Cinzia Zenocchini
But I begin to hear the rumble of the great resignations, the preventive ones of the Italian boys and girls, who say no to parenthood.
Those who block such an urgent and indispensable measure must face the consequences. The responsibility of a country without children is all his.
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