The progressive media uses the birth rate against the government and talks about insufficient welfare. But, as the statistician Roberto Volpi explains, the decline in births is due to the demolition of the home. Supported by them.
Suddenly they all became die-hard birth fans. Istat – as it now inexorably does every year – has produced yet another grave figure on newborns: in 2024 there were around 10,000 fewer than the previous year and the number of children per woman further dropped from 1.20 to 1.18. In addition, the forecasts for the next 12 months are certainly not exciting. And we’ve known that the problem exists for too long, except that now all of a sudden it seems that the left is taking it immensely to heart. Yesterday they performed on the theme Linda Laura Sabbadini, Chiara Saraceno, Tito Boeri: authoritative names, heavyweights. Coincidentally, albeit with slight variations, all of them supported the same thesis: there is a lack of welfare and for this reason puppets are not produced.
According to the Saracenthere is “a range of possible interventions” which could “substantially change the situation of uncertainty and scarcity of resources in which many young people find themselves when they think of starting a family: access to housing is difficult and expensive, if you don’t have parents behind you who are able to lend a hand; an entry into the job market characterized by precariousness and low remuneration, which for women is also accompanied by heavy penalties if and when they decide to have a child”. There is therefore a lack of home and work, but there is also “a scarcity of services for early childhood and of full-time schooling in primary school, and even more so in lower secondary school, a scarcity which has barely been affected by the Pnrr, which should have corrected it drastically”. Also for the Sabbadini the themes are the same: precarious or no work, few leaves… Tito Boeri he insists that we need to “invest in paternity leave, in male-female balance and in nursery schools”.
The history of kindergartens seems particularly dear to progressives and liberals as they should be. Also Francesco Billarirector of Bocconi interviewed by Republicdeclares that “demographic infrastructures” are urgently needed and coins the slogan: “Asylums must be built as well as roads and bridges.” It makes you wonder why there’s so much fuss right now. Especially after, for decades, the progressive world has done everything but push on the issue of birth rates. Indeed, if anything they were loud in repeating that the traditional family had to be overcome, they took care to shout about sexism as soon as someone made a reference to the domestic hearth. In recent times the left-wing media have passionately supported the right not to have children and have also recently raised the barricades over the alleged right to abortion which in Italy is not sufficiently guaranteed. Why this sudden change of direction?
It’s not too hard to imagine. If it is said that no children are born because there is a lack of nursery schools, welfare is lacking and Pnrr money has been misused, the government can be blamed for the decline in births. And certainly much more is expected from a right-wing executive for families and the birth rate, but the fact that those who have always opposed them are complaining is pathetic.
Especially since the kindergarten hype doesn’t hold up. The statistician explains it very well Roberto Volpiwhich has been investigating the topic for years and has just published an essay for Solferino that once again touches on it (it’s titled Promised land and it’s worth the read). “To understand how illusory it is to think that to resolve the birth rate crisis it is necessary to implement measures such as more nurseries, parental leave, tax relief and bonuses for children, support for families with multiple children, etc., the data from the 27 countries of the European Union are enough,” he says. Foxes. «The average number of children per woman has decreased significantly in all European Union countries regardless of the family and birth rate support policies implemented – and the set of those policies exhausts the entire sample in terms of pro-birth rate measures. But this is not enough, because the greatest losses in fertility are found in countries where birth support policies have been in force for the longest and are the most advanced, the most unbalanced in favoring in any way births to young couples, whether married or de facto. This does not happen because those policies are counterproductive, let’s be clear, but because they have given what they could give and now they work very mediocrely, they have minimal hold on the new generations in the midst of fertility and adult life. They worked for fathers, they don’t work for children. Thinking of reducing the great fertility crisis to the insufficiency of material factors and conditions predisposing children is the great, persistent illusion that has dragged us – the Population Division of the UN says it – to the brink of population collapse.”
The crux of the issue, therefore, is not welfare or the number of kindergartens. «At the center, today, of the demographic question there is paradoxically an issue that is not demographic but cultural in its entirety, namely the ultra if not even post-modern conflict that has been created between individualism and family», he continues Foxes. «Individualism has never been directed against the family itself but, if anything, against particular conceptions of family (the family-institution, the family as a nucleus and universe in itself, obviously the patriarchal family, etc.). But today individualism and family tend to conflict regardless of the definitions of individualism and family that one intends to adopt and individualism more and more frequently translates, if not precisely into the rejection of the family in its subordination to the achievement of the goals and values that are typical of individualism: professional success, career, lifestyle, status, money and more generally the realization of oneself in the world and in today’s society as a single individual, single person. The result, rather than a generic crisis of the family, which has been discussed for a long time, lies in its current lack of prospects. We live in a time when no one would bet on family-friendly prospects. The family is almost universally in an even deeper decline than it is today. But the family is at the basis of the birth rate: and here, expressly, is the difficulty of acting on the birth rate.”
To restart the birth rate, we need to act on the family. That is, the institution that Western progressivism has fought more than any other.
