A gentleman who for a while has gone a lot of fashion in Italy (with our usual divisions between Guelphs and Ghibellines), that is Elon Musk: you Italians do no more children and you are destined to disappear. The original text I have adapted it a bit, making it worse journalistically to hit more on the linguistic level, but the concept is that. The data do not lie and, in the first seven months of 2025, the average birth rate fell to 3,4 per thousand, from 3,6 of 2024, the year in which the lowest average peak of children per single woman, or 1,8.
The crisis mainly concerns couples made up of Italians; data are basically stable in mixed couples and in those in which both members are foreigners. There are fewer children in the centre and south of our country; things go a little better in the North. If someone thinks of the historical inequalities that characterize us, with our Mezzogiorno back of several points regarding the average of the parameters that indicate the socio-economic well-being compared to the Settentrione, it is quite right.
The President of the Republic, Mattarella, recently intervened on the subject, indicated as always the route and compass: we need more adequate salaries and more services. Clearly, it seems to me, without going to look for astrological and sociological analyses. The key is therefore economic and relative philosophy of surrounding life. You have to be able to think you can afford one or more children. And then we are still under the European average of the number of nurseries considered sufficient in the various territorial contexts. Here too the difference between North and South feels, but the theme is general and concerns, for example, the money of the PNRR that had to be destined for these projects.
It is in fact that still today a woman in Italy must make the dramatic choice between work (where, despite the progress, is less paid and has less chance of men) and motherhood. The Meloni government has clearly explained the problem and has allocated more than 4 billion for the family in the law of budget in question: much, if you think the whole maneuver will be about 18 billion.
In summary, the real problem however is the sense of the future that the Italians have today, especially the youngest: little confidence, little perspective and a paradox. In a society, however, richer and that comes from about 80 years of peace (with the exception of civil war in the former Yugoslavia and the Russian invasion of Ukraine), children are more pessimistic than fathers and grandparents, who have lived poverty and wars.
The capitalist progress of liberal Western democracies has brought average well-being and has extended lives, but obviously has not brought the sense of happiness, a clear theme for the founders of the first great democracy in the world, that is America.
Then there are the farts of the future, who see us Europeans in 50 years blacker and more Islamic: the famous secularization of the lazy and decadent West. But without wrapping the head with hypotheses that perhaps the story, capricious, will demolish, we begin – at least we Italians – to be more pragmatic. We put on the theme of birth more money and more ideas.In Paris, which is an hour of plane from Milan, where I live, it seems to be more children than in the vital but narcissistic financial capital of Italy.
Article What will the Italians do? It’s from IlNewyorkese.
