Demography, only one in 15 people in Italy is an adolescent (the over-65s are one in 4)

Today in Italy there are just over 4 million 13-19 year-olds, 6.86% of the total population, or one in 15, a rather small number if we consider that the over-65s are one in 4. In 1983 there were over 6.5 million and they represented 11.6% of the population. The figure is contained in the 16th edition of the Atlas of Childhood at Risk in Italy, entitled 'Unfiltered', released today, Friday 14 November, by Save the Children, the organisation that has been fighting for over 100 years to save girls and boys at risk and guarantee them a future, just a few days before World Childhood and Adolescence Day.

Looking to the future, the situation is destined to get even worse: the teenage group will shrink to 3 million 760 thousand in 2030 and to less than 3 million in 2050 (2 million 947 thousand). From a territorial point of view, there are not very wide gaps, although the teenage quotas in Liguria, Molise and Sardinia are particularly low (only 6.1%), while the highest are those of Campania (7.6%) and the Autonomous Province of Bolzano (7.5%).

Family configurations are also changing: more and more teenagers are only children (they are 22% and families with teenagers who have only one child are 27.5%) and today almost one teenager in four lives with only one parent (4.4% of families with teenage children are composed of a single parent father and 18.5% of a single mother). Isolation may be one of the fundamental problems for families with teenagers, because they are a minority group (they represent only 12.1% of the total number of households, with or without children) particularly at risk of poverty and social exclusion (46% of single-parent families with two or more teenage children compared with 20.7% of families with two parents and only one 11-15 year old child).

On average, in Italy, in 2024, more than one teenager between 11 and 15 years of age out of 4 (26.1%) is at risk of poverty or social exclusion, with wide gaps between the North (15.2%), the Centre (24.1%) and the South (41.9%), and between those who have Italian citizenship (24.2%) and those who do not (38%). One out of every 20 adolescents aged 12-15 (5.2%) is in food poverty and 8.2% of children and adolescents under the age of 16 are in energy poverty, i.e. they cannot heat their homes adequately. Experiencing poverty on one's own skin also means experiencing difficult housing conditions, such as overcrowding in the home, which affects 43% of families with children aged 11-15, more than 2 out of 5 families, while for total families the share is 16.6%, i.e. one family in 6.

The rate of early school leavers at the end of high school is 8.7% (being higher among boys, at 10.7%, +4 percentage points compared to girls), with very wide differences both between the regions of the country (from 2.3% and 2.4% in Friuli Venezia Giulia and Trentino to 17.6% in Campania and 15.9% in Sardinia), and between the different addresses, from 3.9% in high schools to 10.8% in technical institutes and 22.8% in vocational institutes. Early school leavers (18-24 year-olds who dropped out of school or vocational training) are 9.8%, a marked improvement on 2020, when they were 14.3%, but with much higher percentages among boys (12.2% in 2024, they were 16.9% in 2020) and much lower percentages among girls (7.1% in 2024, they were 11.3% in 2020). Here, too, regional differences are very wide: they range from 15.2% in Sicily to 4.8% in Molise.