by Andrea Bernardini
Alfredo Caltabiano, president of ANFN (National Association of Large Families): “This is why the birth of a child is often one of the major causes of poverty (…) One in three large families finds itself in this situation”.
“Raising a child? It costs parents as much as a medium-sized house in Rome or Milan.” This is the conviction of Matteo Rizzolli, a Roman father of six and professor of Political Economy at Lumsa University. “According to the Bank of Italy,” Rizzolli recounts, “a couple of parents spends an average of €640 a month on their child (almost €8,000 a year). But this is a partial estimate, as it only takes into account direct costs: food, clothing, school, transportation, sports. Last year, a master’s student of mine, Gianmaria Ferretti, tried to add invisible costs to these items: unpaid care work, a slowed or interrupted career, and therefore lost income, especially for mothers. He arrived at a very different estimate: a child “erodes” the parents’ financial resources (between real expenses, missed opportunities, and lost income) by more than €24,000 a year. For eighteen years. If you do the math: almost 440,000 euros to raise a child to independence. And then, at 18, one is rarely independent.”
“Perhaps this is why the birth of a child is one of the major causes of poverty for Italian families,” comments Alfredo Caltabiano, president of ANFN, the association that has been uniting and giving voice to large families in Italy since 2004. And the more children you have, the greater the risk of sliding into poverty. One statistic stands out: “According to ISTAT, nearly 157,400 couples with at least three children are below the absolute poverty line. This means that at least one in three large families finds itself in this situation,” observes Caltabiano. At the recent “Human Whole” festival promoted by the “Ditelo sui tetti” network, the ANFN president, addressing Economy Minister Giorgetti, returned to the topic of structural family policies such as “the reform of reforms”: “We need fairer taxation for families with children, a thorough review of the ISEE (Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator), the strengthening of family-friendly local networks, and the approval of a specific law for large families.”
Twenty-four thousand euros a year, we wrote. “That figure is a real cost, but invisible in family budgets. That’s why it’s so hard to see. And so easy to ignore politically,” Rizzolli observes. Curiously, “We can measure GDP to the third decimal place, but not the cost of growth for an Italian. Perhaps because as long as we treat it as a purely private choice, the state doesn’t feel the need to measure it.”
And how much does it cost the state—in terms of services—to support a child’s growth? “There’s no precise estimate of the public cost of supporting a child from birth to independence. However, we know (and this is shown by the intergenerational justice index by Vanhuysse, a researcher who compared 29 OECD countries) that Southern European countries—Italy in the lead—for every euro spent on a non-elderly person, they spend six for every elderly person. This isn’t a criticism of the elderly: it’s a snapshot of where public resources are going.”
How much will that child who needs our attention today, once independent, “give back” to the Italian system? Excellent question. And an honest answer: we don’t know. There are no studies that tell us how much a single citizen contributes to the system over the course of their working life. What we do know is that the Italian pension system works on a pay-as-you-go basis: today’s workers pay today’s pensions. It’s not a fund where you accumulate your contributions: it’s an intergenerational pact. Until a few decades ago, economists studied the demographic dividend: the benefits that population growth brings to a country—more workers, more tax revenue, more innovation, more consumption. Today, the problem is exactly the opposite: what is the missing demographic dividend? Every child not born is one less taxpayer, one less teacher, one less doctor. The costs of the declining birth rate don’t appear in any public budget. No line item says “lost tax revenue from unborn citizens.” But it is the quietest debt we are accumulating – and perhaps the heaviest.”