Italy’s Demographic Winter: Intentions, Constraints and Freedoms

Towards an Emancipatory Family Policy

By Rita Picchianti and Paolo Moroni – National Association of Large Families (ANFN) – Italy

Introduction

Italy’s demographic decline is neither a statistical fluctuation nor a transient anomaly: it is the outcome of a structural transformation in the post-demographic transition era. Its causes are multiple and intertwined, insofar as the aggregate figures observable at the macro level represent the sum of profoundly personal choices not always reducible to discrete, identifiable variables.

Among the many possible interpretive frameworks, this paper focuses on those circumstances in which the decision not to have a child stems from a structural mismatch between citizens’ reproductive aspirations and the inadequacy of existing welfare provision and support services. This gap between desire and reality constitutes a barrier to full reproductive autonomy.

ISTAT’s 2024 data indicate that 62.2% of those who do not intend to have children attribute their decision to concrete constraints — financial, occupational or care-related. This would appear to be a question of resources rather than of values. Yet the contradiction is only apparent: adverse economic conditions do not merely prevent those who want children from having them — they do something more insidious. They foreclose the very possibility of experiencing parenthood as an act of gift and generosity. When everyday life is permeated by economic anxiety and precarity, there is no space in which to discover the joy of raising a family.

The crisis of meaning is therefore not only a cause of demographic decline: it is, in part, its effect. It is not that Italians have ceased to regard children as a blessing — rather, the conditions in which they experience parenthood do not allow them to experience it as such.

For this reason, family policy should not be pro-natalist in orientation, but emancipatory: its purpose should be to create the conditions under which those who already hold a cultural, spiritual or emotional inclination towards a larger family can realise that aspiration without economic constraints, transforming a vocation into an act of sacrifice. This requires both structural policies that remove material obstacles and a cultural framework capable of restoring meaning to parenthood. The two dimensions are mutually reinforcing — and mutually demanding.

Cultural Resistance and the Limits of Quantitative Policy

The central argument of this paper concerns whether strategies focused exclusively on ‘encouraging a second child’ are sufficient to stabilise the demographic pyramid. Such an approach may appear rational on paper; in practice, however, demography is not merely statistics — demographic data are the numerical reflection of the lived conditions of everyday life. A purely quantitative approach runs up against deep-seated cultural and psychological barriers.

For those who already have one child, the decision not to have more is often rooted in settled convictions and established ways of life that are inherently resistant to financial incentives. Those who do choose to have a second or third child, by contrast, tend to do so on the basis of the value they place on larger families: such households are typically more receptive to policies that promote parenthood as a private choice that also constitutes a public good. A genuinely democratic policy must therefore prioritise protecting and empowering those who already have a vocation for a large family, ensuring that this generosity does not result in systemic impoverishment or social marginalisation.

Capability approach and the ‘Missing Child’ indicator

Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach offers a useful framework here: well-being is not measured solely in terms of income, but as the freedom to realise one’s life plans. From this perspective, demographic decline represents a democratic failure — the failure to remove the material obstacles that deprive citizens of the freedom to realise one of their most intimate aspirations.

The most significant indicator in this regard is the ‘missing child’: the gap between the ideal number of children desired — consistently around two per couple in Italian surveys — and the actual total fertility rate, currently approximately 1.2. The FSS 2024 survey confirms that only 21.2% of 18–49-year-olds intend to have a child within the next three years.

The most alarming figure concerns the transition to a third child: the proportion intending to do so falls to 4.8% among those who already have two or more children, while the proportion stating ‘definitely not’ has risen to 71.3% (compared with approximately 60% in 2009). For many families, the second child is perceived as the maximum compatible with both the labour market and a welfare system that is rarely designed with larger families in mind.

Intentions and Outcomes

The desire to have children in Italy has not dissipated, but it meets structural obstacles that render it unrealisable. ISTAT’s longitudinal data tracking women who in 2016 stated they ‘definitely’ intended to have a child within three years found that fewer than half actually did so. Fertility intentions systematically overestimate actual fertility outcomes.

Some 82% of individuals under 25 plan to have children — confirming that the family unit has not faded from the Italian collective imagination. Among 25–34-year-olds, this proportion drops to just under half: not because of a shift in values, but because in that age cohort, economic, occupational and relational constraints become concretely apparent. The intention-outcome gap is a precise measure of the obstacles that policy should address. Italy’s demographic winter is not the product of a society that has stopped wanting children: it is the product of a society that has failed to create the conditions for that desire to be realised.

Why People Give Up: A Hierarchy of Constraints

Economic factors are the most frequently cited across almost all groups, though the hierarchy of reasons shifts with family experience. Among the childless, the absence of a partner and age-related considerations carry significant weight: the perceived window for becoming a parent narrows before conditions are deemed adequate. Among those with one child, age-related constraints and eldercare responsibilities become more prominent. Among those with two or more children, purely financial constraints come to the fore: expanding the family is perceived as an economically unsustainable step. For this group, the policy priorities are proportional family taxation and accessible, affordable childcare provision.

Almost one in five households with three or more children falls into absolute poverty: the transition from two to three children represents the most dramatic shift in poverty risk across the entire distribution (rising from 10.6% to 20.7%). The 4.8% positive intention towards a third child does not measure Italians’ desire for a large family: it measures how many people believe they can afford one under current conditions.

The Social Dynamics of Large-Family Norms

Social science research has documented for decades that individuals tend to align their choices with the perceived norms of their reference group. When the prevailing norm is ‘two children is standard, three is excessive’, those who want three children face not only economic constraints but also social pressure that frames their choice as eccentric or irresponsible. Many families consequently internalise this constraint early, treating the prospect of a third child as practically unattainable — not only for financial reasons, but because the social and identity costs appear prohibitive. The third child becomes a private aspiration that never crystallises into a stated intention, well before any survey interview.

Public recognition of large families can influence these dynamics, but only if it is concrete and structural rather than merely rhetorical. The most powerful arenas in which social norms are formed are not media platforms, but workplaces, schools, and social networks. Family-friendly employment policies, paternity leave that normalises shared caregiving, and public spaces designed with multi-child families in mind are the instruments that shape the norms people encounter in daily life.

The Gender Gap and the Burden of Care

Regarding the prospect of a second child, men and women express significantly divergent intentions: explicit female reluctance rises to 47%, compared with 25% among men. It is mothers who, after their first child, experience a perceived cost so high that it suppresses the desire for a second, not for lack of desire per se, but owing to the combined effect of the motherhood penalty, the isolation of caregiving, and external social judgment.

Motherhood in Italy entails an occupational and wage penalty with no equivalent for fathers. Italian mothers raise their children in a structural isolation that previous generations did not experience: geographical mobility has separated families from grandparents, and urbanisation has fragmented local support networks. The response ‘I cannot manage’ to the question of a second child is not primarily an economic one: it is a response about human sustainability. Rebuilding neighbourhood and community networks means recognising that care is a social activity, not an individual responsibility.

An effective system provides both high-quality nursery places for those who wish or need to return to work early, and adequately compensated parental leave for those who wish to remain with their child during the critical early months. Mandatory, well-remunerated paternity leave is not merely a matter of equity: it is also a fertility measure, insofar as active paternal involvement in the care of the first child has been shown to increase maternal willingness to consider a second.

A Life-Cycle Approach

There is no single set of demographic measures that is universally effective. Policy must be flexible and calibrated to the stage of a family’s life cycle: employment security and access to housing for childless couples; extended parental leave and support for maternal return to the labour market for those with one child; progressive household taxation and priority access to public services for those with two or more children. The central challenge is the position of women, since it is mothers who bear the highest costs of parenthood — economic, relational and cultural. No financial transfer can substitute for the presence of a human support network.

Italy’s demographic decline is not merely a question of numbers: it is also a democratic failure to remove the structural obstacles that prevent citizens from realising their life plans. The role of government is not to persuade Italians to want more children than they do, but to ensure that those who already want them can actually have them.

Welfare Policy and Family Policy: A Necessary Distinction

Article 31 of the Italian Constitution provides that: “The Republic shall facilitate, through economic measures and other provisions, the formation of the family and the fulfilment of related duties, with particular regard to large families. It shall protect motherhood, childhood and youth, promoting the institutions necessary for this purpose.”

In practice, this constitutional mandate has given rise to a persistent conflation of welfare policy and family policy — a confusion compounded by the incorporation into Italian law of the Equivalent Economic Situation Indicator (ISEE, Indicatore della Situazione Economica Equivalente) as the primary means-testing instrument for measures directed at families with children.

The ISEE was introduced by the Prodi government under Legislative Decree No. 109 of 31 March 1998, as part of a broader reform of Italian social services, to replace the inconsistent, fragmented and often opaque local criteria that had prevailed until the 1990s. Its purpose was to measure the ‘economic capacity’ of each household by taking into account income, movable and immovable assets, and household composition, thereby moving beyond simple IRPEF (personal income tax) gross income as a reference metric. With these characteristics, the ISEE remains a largely unique instrument within the European context.

A major reform was subsequently enacted in 2011 under the Monti technocratic government (Decree-Law No. 201/2011, the so-called ‘Save Italy’ package) and implemented by Prime Ministerial Decree No. 159/2013, which entered into force in 2015. This reform extended the ISEE to include exempt income — i.e. transfers paid for any reason by public bodies — and placed greater weight on asset valuations. Despite a gradual process of incremental improvement in recent years, the instrument retains structural shortcomings.

The ISEE was designed as a welfare instrument, not as a tool for supporting natality or recognising the costs of family responsibility. Italy has never established a stable, coherent framework for family policy; consequently, whenever the political intention has been to ‘support families’, the only available instrument — the ISEE — has been deployed. Over time, the underlying assumption has taken hold that families with children should receive public support only if they are in financial difficulty, generating a proliferation of welfare transfers with all the attendant distortions of means-testing, in which the treatment of non-monetisable assets — notably housing equity — has produced, and continues to produce, significant inequities.

To restore coherence to social policy, the following distinction must be maintained clearly:

The Universal Child Benefit (Assegno Unico Universale)

The introduction of Assegno Unico e Universale (AUU) on 1 March 2022, following an eight-month transitional period, represented a modest improvement in provision for families, though fundamental problems remain unresolved, given the scheme’s complete dependence on the ISEE indicator.

The AUU is, in substance, a welfare measure. Owing to its high degree of selectivity — directly indexed to the ISEE — it cannot be categorised within the broader scope of family policy. Its principal characteristics are as follows:

• Positive: For the first time, the benefit is payable to all workers, including the self-employed and VAT-registered individuals, thereby achieving horizontal universality. It is also a structural rather than discretionary measure.
• Positive: The benefit is indexed to inflation annually.
• Positive: For the lowest income brackets, the benefit amount exceeds the tax expenditure threshold, thereby releasing capacity for further tax relief instruments.
• Negative: The benefit is indexed to the ISEE — the Enabling Act provided that certain ISEE components, including the Income Situation Indicator (Indicatore della Situazione Reddituale, ISR), could be used as reference metrics, which effectively curtails vertical universality.
• Negative: The benefit is sharply reduced when a child reaches 18 — precisely the age at which the financial burden on the household increases substantially — and ceases entirely at 21, even where the child remains in full-time higher education. The partial reinstatement of IRPEF deductions for dependent children provides only limited compensation and, for calculation purposes, is subject to the differing income levels of individual households.
• Negative: The complete abolition of IRPEF deductions for dependent children eliminated the limited degree of horizontal tax equity that those deductions had previously generated.
• Negative: The annual benefit amount is incorrectly classified, for ISEE purposes, as disposable income and therefore contributes to the computation of the ISR. This inflates the ISEE value used for other means-tested benefits, with the sole exception of the AUU itself. A structural paradox results: since the benefit was largely funded through the abolition of IRPEF deductions for dependent children, what were previously tax expenditures effectively become ‘disposable income’ for ISEE purposes, as certified via the Single Certification (Certificazione Unica).

A Tax Reform Proposal to Achieve Substantive Equality

All measures aimed at supporting families — parental leave, services, community networks, housing policies — share a common prerequisite: the tax system must cease to be neutral with respect to household composition and become instead an active instrument of substantive equity. Tax reform is therefore not the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but the structural foundation upon which all other measures must rest if they are to achieve coherence and sustainability. Without a tax system that structurally recognises the economic burden of parenthood, every other intervention risks remaining fragmented, insufficient, and perceived as welfare rather than as the acknowledgement of a right.

Article 53 of the Italian Constitution establishes that: “Everyone is required to contribute to public expenditure in proportion to their ability to pay. The tax system is based on progressive criteria.”

The concept of ‘ability to pay’ is intended both as a theoretical limit and as a practical guarantee ensuring that the tax burden is proportionate — and not excessive — relative to income earned, while ensuring that essential needs are met. In practice, however, the system is progressive on an individual rather than household basis, and does not account for the number of dependents within the household unit.

A parent with two dependent children and a single individual with identical gross income do not possess the same real disposable income: they face radically different needs, structurally different fixed costs, and a capacity to contribute to public expenditure that cannot be measured by individual income alone. It is, moreover, households in the so-called ‘squeezed middle’ that bear the greatest burden: contributing substantially to tax revenues while being largely ineligible for the relief measures designed for lower income brackets.

It is therefore necessary to complete the tax reform already provided for by the 2023 Enabling Act, restoring alignment between the tax burden and genuine ability to pay: at a minimum, establishing a no-tax area for each dependent child in the household, or equivalent measures.

Conclusion

Italy’s demographic winter is not the product of a society that has stopped wanting children. It is the product of a system — fiscal, labour market, housing, cultural — that systematically transforms desire into renunciation, ultimately reshaping the desires themselves.

The family policy Italy needs does not seek to persuade citizens to want what they do not want, nor one that simply deploys financial incentives in an attempt to ‘purchase’ births. It is a policy that takes substantive freedom — in Sen’s sense — seriously as its evaluative criterion: it is not sufficient for a right to exist in law; it must be genuinely exercisable in practice.

The call to life is universal, without exception. Parenthood is perhaps the most profound gift available to human beings, and those who experience it cannot but bear witness to it: fears about the future recede, for they prove illusory — and from that release, joy becomes possible.

It is then that family policies — structural ones, not temporary and inequitable bonus schemes — can also become co-generative.

References

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