In the hearts of Italian families, 2025 begins with some signs of hope, but also with many shadows, amid increasingly impetuous winds of war, and a concern for environmental sustainability that becomes real eco-anxiety, generating fear and paralyzing feeling of having very little control over one’s future.” He has no doubts Francesco Bellettidirector of CISF, the research center that has been photographing the “state of health” of Italian families for fifty years. Even the development of the economic system, in the face of some positive data, such as that on employment which is finally experiencing stable and consistent growth, highlights signs of great fragility «like the continuing precariousness of work – moreover poorly paid – of too many young people, or the crisis of the entire car system, Stellantis and Volkswagen in the lead. The very daily lives of people seem to be characterized by growing widespread violence, from bullying between children to violence and killings in the family.”
Thus, a young couple, if they watch the news, find very few good reasons to give birth to a child, and too many to decide not to. «2024 leaves us with a further decline in the number of children born, with an increasingly frozen demographic winterand no signs that lead us to hope that this trend will change in 2025. In Italy, giving birth to a child, in the eyes of our young people, is increasingly a risky gamble, a real leap into the dark. And certainly the financial support of the single allowance is not enough, or the weak signs of an increase in care services (nurseries) or parental (and paternal) leave. The signs of support for the birth rate “whisper”, drowned in a sea of ”bad news” that scream in the ears of our young people: is it really worth bringing a child into the world?
Then it is time to turn a gaze of greater esteem and respect towards those almost 380 thousand young couples who had the courage to welcome a child in 2024, thus testifying, without much speech, to a hope in the future that makes us generative and audacious. «In 2025 there will be just as many who will make the same choice: many of these children will be born to parents who come from other countries, who have placed their hope in Italy, to the point of entrusting their children to this country. “Pilgrims of hope”, as the Year of Jubilee says, but above all witnesses that hope is possible. And if the decline in the birth rate continues in 2025, it will not be the fault of immature or fearful young people: it will be a responsibility – and a defeat – of the entire country”
