Allowance for an adult daughter: the labour market situation has an impact

The judge cannot order the revocation of child support for the twenty-year-old daughter without also considering the situation of the labour market. And in the South, opportunities to find employment are scarce for everyone, but they are even more so for women. The Cassazione thus upholds the appeal by the mother of a 20-year-old Sicilian girl, against the Court of Appeal's decision to revoke the allowance the father paid in her favour and also the assignment of the family home.

A choice dictated by the fact that the young woman was no longer studying and had not yet found a job. For the appeal judges, he was old enough to be considered autonomous: he had given up books and there was no reason to prevent him from working. The conclusion reached by the Supreme Court was different. The judges of legitimacy recall, in fact, that theparents' obligation to support their children does not automatically end when they become of age, but only when they are economically autonomous. Of course the purse strings cannot remain open indefinitely. There are many variables: from the chosen course of study, to the economic possibilities of the parents, from age, to the labour market. And on the latter two circumstances the Court of Appeal did not dwell.

The girl, whom the father had asked to suspend maintenance after saying he was willing to pay it, was only twenty at the time of the appeal case, and nineteen at first instance. In addition, she lived in Sicily, in the province of Ragusa. In the opinion of the Court of Cassation, these are two good reasons to continue to support her.

It is in fact up to the parent obliged to pay the allowance who sues for revocation to provide the proof that the adult child does not take steps to emancipate himself from the family. A proof that becomes less and less stringent as the adult 'grows up', to the point of being in fact among the under 30 who do not study and make no effort to become financially independent. And this is in the name of a duty of self-responsibility, which requires the child not to "demand the continuation of parental obligations beyond reasonable limits of time and extent, because the parents' obligation is justified within the limits of the pursuit of an educational project and a training course".

In the case examined, therefore, the Court, in excluding the maintenance contribution to be paid by the separated father, could not limit itself to 'merely pointing out that the young woman did not continue her studies, without assessing at all her concrete condition, i.e. her working capacity in relation to her professional training and to the concrete possibilities of the local labour market in general (in Sicily, in the province of Ragusa) and female employment in particular'.