LItaly is aging, births and marriages are decreasing. And families change, year after year: in 2020-2021 there were 25.6 million but with an average number of members ever smaller, 2.3 people (they were 2.6 in 2000-2001).
Unmarried couples, reconstituted families, singles and single parents (even with a 30-year-old child at home) they are all growing types. It is the photograph of the Italian family of the Report Istat 2022, now in its thirtieth edition.
Italy, the country of singles
Therefore, the single-person families which go from 24 to 33.2% (8.5 million of people). And those too with a single parent and children (almost one in ten). If in the North East single people and couples with children are already equivalent (each 30% of the total), in Center and in the Northwest single-member families prevail (36% against about 28% of couples with children) while couples with children still prevail in the South (about 36% against about 30% of single people).
Continuing these trends, in 2040 almost 4 out of 10 families could be made up of lonely people, especially the elderly. And Land couples without children could outnumber those with children by following five years.
Life alone, children, work: everything is done later
All the crucial stages of life slide forward. Thus the vast majority of young people, 67.6%, do not leave home until old age (over 7 million 18-34 year olds still live with their parents, while the EU average is one in two). The economic uncertainty is, of course, responsible. And while young Italians dream of a future outside our country, there are 280,000 young people awaiting the reform of the ius scholae to receive citizenship.
The postponement of motherhood is also increasingly accentuated. Compared to 1995, the average age at childbirth increases by over two years, reaching a 32.2 in 2020. The average number of children per woman is 1.25.
Families, divorces, separations
On the other hand, births out of wedlock increased, especially in the years of the pandemic: 159,453 in 2021, or 25,000 more than in 2011 and 106,000 more than in 2001. Mainly due to the halving of marriages recorded in 2020 and not yet recovered. Divorces are stable, separations increase.
The number of couples in which the woman is more educated is increasing
Couples have also transformed within themselves. Those in which the partners have the same level of education are in the majority but in sharp decline; On the other hand, couples are growing in which the level of one of the two partners exceeds the other, and in this context there are more women (while at the beginning of the millennium the opposite was true). The increase in couples where women are more educated than men represents a far-reaching change which involves all types of couples and all areas of the country: a change that will perhaps finally influence the processes of sharing family responsibilities.
But on the job front …
At the moment, if from the point of view of education the changes within the couple have been very pronounced, the same has not happened on the labor front. Couples in which both partners work and women are up to 64 years old do not reach the half. The growth of double work couples emerges only for those in which the woman is between 45 and 54 years old. In 20 years, for couples where the woman is youngerup to 44 years, the situation, on the other hand, has remained more or less the same.
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