The 'complicated' choice of motherhood in Italia

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Children? No thanks. Mothers' fatigue discourages girls' motherhood

The postponement of the choice to become a mother is growing: costs discourage and incentives are not enough to change one's mind

by Flavia Landolfi and Manuela Perrone

10 May 2026

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Daughters look at us. And what they see takes them away from motherhood. Tiredness, constant running, jobs held together by interlocking, acrobatics to reconcile everything: private life and work, social life and family. Children, indeed. And then also elderly parents. Mothers as social shock absorbers: a reality that one pretends not to see, but which is there for all to see. The result is a burnout that bends the mothers, but ends up infecting the daughters as well, who watch them run, exhausted, and ward off the spectre of ending up like hamsters in the same wheel.

The numbers could not be clearer. According to the report on 'Fertility Intentions' published by Istat in December, in 2024 just 21.2% of Italians between 18 and 49 years of age say they want to have a child in the three years following the interview. It was 25% in 2003. More than 10.5 million people do not want to have children or more children either in the short term or in the future. But the figure that weighs most heavily is another: more than 65% of younger women (18-24 years) think that the arrival of a child will worsen their job opportunities. And half of the women believe that with a baby their working conditions will get worse.

It is not a false perception, but a truth. According to the data provided by Istat to Save the Children for the report 'The Balancing Wives', in 2025 the employment rate of mothers between 25 and 54 years of age with at least one child of pre-school age will stop at 58.2%, while among women without children of pre-school age it will be 66.1%, about 8 points apart. The motherhood penalty is the child of die-hard prejudices. This is proved by its opposite: the fatherhood bonus, which rewards men who become fathers at work, perceived as more reliable. In fact, 59% do not imagine any effect of fatherhood on their working life. It is a stark, almost brutal distance: the choice of parenthood is immediately perceived as asymmetrical.

This is not surprising. The girls have seen and are seeing mothers in and out of work, slowing down, giving up, carrying double and triple loads. They have seen careers shrink, personal time disappear, energies depleted. They have seen motherhood turn into an endurance test, producing real inequalities. The experience becomes a stronger warning than any incentive. And the birth rate freeze persists: in Italia in 2025 just 355,000 children will be born, -3.9% compared to 2024. The overall population only holds thanks to migration. The average number of children per woman is still falling: 1.14 in 2025, against 1.18 in 2024. And the average age at childbirth rises to 32.7 years.

The bottleneck is also demographic. The decline in births is due both to the lower propensity to have children and to the reduction in the number of potential parents. Within this transformation, the family is also changing. Single-person households are now the most widespread form: 37.1% of the total. Couples with children, for years the prevalent model, have dropped to 28.4 per cent, those without children are 20.2 per cent.

The context does not help. Daughters look at their mothers, sure. But they also look at the country around them: expensive houses, fragile jobs, low incomes, discontinuous services. Motherhood no longer appears as a natural stage of adult life, but as a choice to be borne almost alone. The roots of this imbalance lie in the distribution of free care work. In Europe it is still women who bear the largest share of family and domestic care, with direct effects on careers and well-being. The Eige 2025 report records in Italia, Greece and Cyprus a difference of almost 40 points between women and men in daily involvement in household chores.

Economist Azzurra Rinaldi, director of the School of Gender Economics at Unitelma Sapienza University and coordinator of a rare survey on the effect of free care work on time and health, knows this well. "We worked three years on this research. The numbers are precise: between 81 and 83 per cent of the women between 25 and 45 years of age surveyed declare chronic care-load fatigue, to the point that they do not even carve out an hour a day for themselves. Time scarcity is the central mechanism through which the gender gap is produced and perpetuated. It is an economic indicator that we have chosen not to read for too long'. Tiredness has been dismissed as a private matter, but the numbers tell a different story: in Italia, 70 per cent of voluntary resignations concern working mothers.

The daughters watch. And they postpone. Almost 90% of 18-24 year olds do not want children in the next three years, but 81.8% imagine them in the future. It is a forward-looking yes that increasingly often does not come true, as family plans along the way shrink or evaporate. The reasons? One third cite economic reasons, 9.4% inadequate work, 8.6% the absence of a partner. But beneath these numbers lies something deeper: an assessment of the quality of life that is possible. The new generations are not simply giving up children. They are redefining the conditions for having them. Work must hold, time must be adequate, life must not buckle under the boulder of fatigue. The solutions hypothesised also confirm this: 28.5% indicate economic aid as the first measure to support the birth rate, 26.1% childcare services, 23.1% housing facilities.

In the meantime, however, daughters continue to watch us. And, still unable to know the extraordinary enrichment that motherhood brings, to wonder how much we lose by becoming mothers. How much do you get to keep of your previous life? How much is left of oneself, of work, of time, of freedom? It is in these questions, more than in bonuses, that the fate of the Italian birth rate is being decided today. "Decades of comparative literature," confirms Rinaldi, "tell us that bonuses do not shift birth rates. In rich countries where women work more, more children are born. What discourages young women is the cost of motherhood, which falls on their autonomy'. To overcome this, there is only one recipe: 'Mandatory paternity leave, universal childcare and companies that stop penalising carers. Don't leave women alone. Change the gaze of girls.