Young people must be given the freedom to choose

At the end of reproductive life, the gap between desired and actual fertility corresponds to 0.8 children for men and 0.7 for women. In a recent study published in the Population Research and Policy Review (conducted together with Giulia Feltrin, Rebecca Soldo, Valeria Ferraretto and Raffaele Guetto) we also found a gap between the desired and actual age at first childbearing: 65% of parents who had their first child between the ages of 30 and 34 said they would have liked to have had it earlier, as did 96% of mothers who had their first child after the age of 40. The actual age at which young people achieve economic independence and stability in work and housing is now too often above the age considered ideal by young people themselves and is also higher than the peak age of human fertility.

This, according to the United Nations Population Fund, is "the real fertility crisis", a crisis of denied choices, linked to the existence of obstacles and barriers that lead to postponing or giving up having children, or to moving abroad, in contexts where it is faster to "become an adult". Public policies, if designed with a person-centred, inclusive, gender equity approach, can help remove at least some of these barriers. Not to increase birth rates, but to enable young people to freely choose whether and how many children to have and when to have them.

The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether the universal single allowance has increased the number of births or the average number of children per woman, but whether it has reduced the gap between desired and actual fertility, improved family welfare, and reduced poverty and inequality. In this logic, the debate on the usefulness of the single allowance is dangerous: couples with children represent a decreasing share of households and therefore lose electoral weight. There is a risk that politics disinvests, while instead economic aid, services, reconciliation and leave should be enhanced for the welfare of families, those that already exist.

Then there are the families that do not yet exist and could exist, or form sooner, if the obstacles to young people achieving economic independence were removed. Young people need confidence, opportunities, a sense of security and hope. The recent ISTAT annual report leaves little hope: the share of those born between 1980 and 1994 who experience descending social mobility, for the first time, exceeds the share of those experiencing upward mobility. In practice, young people are worse off than their parents even though, as a generation, they are, on average, better educated. There is little hope especially for girls: out of 148 countries analysed by the World Economic Forum in the Global Gender Gap Report, Italia ranks 85th for gender equality; Germany 9th, the United Kingdom 4th, the Scandinavian countries in the top-3.