Protected by the extended family network
The key word is net, networks. Everyone will build their own shelter. Leaving the household is linked to increased life expectancy and individualism. But it is necessary to learn to exchange, using the only possible currency: trust
The end of the traditional family as a comfort zone of conviviality and family speech.
Between Lessico famigliare by Natalia Ginzburg (the novel that won the Strega Prize in 1963 and was later translated even into Korean) and La portalettere by Francesca Giannone (a family saga that became the best-selling book of 2023), sixty years have passed. But, above all, three things have happened. We recorded the highest birthrate in history in 1963 and, in 2023, we reached its lowest point (we’ve fallen below 59 million people for the first time). Meanwhile, we’ve also created new families. Ginzburg’s story, so full of tales of uncles, brothers, cousins and family friends, is part of us, but it’s only our comfort zone, intimate and deeply rooted. Beyond that, everything has changed outside: our story is less collective, and we enjoy reading sagas like Giannone’s, but only that. In everyday life, we practice individualism as if it were the only internal law, and if there’s an epic we’re working on, it’s the personal one. We are the only heroes, or perhaps the only protagonists: that’s the truth.
We are the baby boomer who, at her 70th birthday party, announced to her children and grandchildren her divorce from her husband. We are the grandmother who is often on the phone for work calls: the Fornero law doesn’t allow women to retire before the age of 67, and some of them are fine with that (“I love my job”, they say). We are the diverse group of millennials, where one has divorced in six months (thanks to the 2023 law on fast-track divorces), another has sold the family villa in Sicily to buy a small apartment on the outskirts of Milan to keep elderly parents nearby, and another has rented out their house in Turin to move back to Naples, the city where they have relatives and friends, and where they will live between remote work and flights to the Turin office. We are the ones writing wonderful books with plots that, coincidentally, always revolve around relationships with the father and mother.
The extended family map is a patchwork of relationships between former and new partners with children, old and new relatives, flexible jobs and elderly people on a call. That is why social housing is on the rise
Single-parent families, single-income, few children. The only way out against the danger of isolation: social housing.
Or with exes, the people we part from while improvising a necessary emotional education that no one has ever taught us before. From Invernale by Dario Voltolini to Il fuoco che ti porti dentro by Antonio Franchini, to I dieci passi dell’addio by Luigi Nacci. We are also something else, finally: we are bearers of an intellectual legacy that sounds like a slogan. “Family is the people you choose,” Michela Murgia reminded us before she passed away. We choose our relatives not because we are often only children, single, or separated today, but because we have first realized a truth: everything changes. That is, the change to which we are exposed is proof that we are alive, and the indissolubility of things born to dissolve has expired.
In other words, we have families that remain our roots, certainly, because we are Italian, and we are also from the land of “amoral familism,” where the interests of one’s family come before those of the community. But these are roots that no moralism, hypocritical happiness, or fake bourgeois values can hide: they are roots exposed to the winds of social change. Vulnerable, shifting. They are like the dangling roots of a ficus tree in Palermo. Conspicuous and visible, hanging behind branches that, after all, are the children to follow when they move to a new city, the grandchildren to care for. Or the new partners to marry for the second time, since, as Murgia said, that “I promise to never leave you” is the cruelest, most arrogant, and inhuman promise one can make.
The confirmation of this trend is the increase in divorces (including late ones, for those over 65), as well as second marriages, blended families, and projects focused on social housing: living together, even with friends—essentially, the relatives we choose—has finally become a reality on a national level. Thus, while the nuclear family (mom, dad, children) relies on video calls to maintain relationships with the extended family (grandparents, uncles, and cousins), in the meantime, a new kind of family is emerging—either much larger (old relatives joined by new partners of exes) or much smaller (single parents by choice or due to separation). Some - times, it’s a couple that remains childless, which is happening more and more frequently.
By 2042, says Istat, only one in four families will be made up of a couple with children. More than one in five will be childless, and 37.5% will consist of just one person. But wasn’t “family” a term used for a group of at least two people? No, families made up of individuals living alone have always existed, but whereas in the past this mainly applied to young men leaving their families for work, for some time now, the “micro-families” are the elderly living alone. This is driven by well-established phenomena—namely the increase in life expectancy and marital instability—and the rise in these figures is a realistic prediction. If today, people aged 65 and over make up about half of those living alone, by 2042 that number will reach almost 60%. There will be more men living alone (+13%), but especially women (+21%).
The numbers are what they are, but everyone thinks about what they will. And I think of the two key words in my conversations over drinks with my friends: aging together. A big house, a little garden. Falling asleep by 9 p.m. on three couches in front of Affari tuoi, cooking and cleaning on a rotating schedule like in student houses. Helping each other, above all—handling paperwork, picking up laundry, surviving the aches and sorrows of the third and fourth age. In our plans, we only see women, and I don’t think that’s just because men live shorter lives. Perhaps it’s because the word “solidarity” is a feminine noun, and language always hits the mark. In any case, senior cohousing is a phenomenon that began in Denmark in the 1960s, initiated by an architect, and it’s now on the rise. In Bari, four women in their sixties have already tried it, and in France and England, it represents 68% of investments in the sector (in Italy, there are about thirty such projects, two thirds of which are private initiatives).
Enjoy retirement, yes, but how? Divorces among the over-65s are on the rise, people are wintering in London with their children, Ltds are opening.
What really matters is the example you ab - sorb indirectly—in other words, the cultural context. This holds true even in Japan. Essentially, the global population values the marital bond because women, by nature, understand that stability is best for children. But not for other reasons: the proof is that today, we can conduct vast and rapid searches to find partners, and the opportunities for relationships are far more numerous, yet this doesn’t seem to contribute to an increase in the number of marriages. As for birth rates, negative records have been updated year after year since 2008: in Japan’s ongoing demographic crisis, the number of babies born decreased for the eighth consecutive year in 2023, reaching a new historic low. This means that up to 42% of women born in 2005 will never have children. While Tokyo has the lowest average number of children per woman among the 47 prefectures (0.99 children per woman), the government has launched a dating app to combat the country’s demographic decline. It’s called “Tokyo Futari Story” and is part of a larger government plan to boost birth rates, with a budget of 500 million yen.
All this suggests that in the near future, the overall size of family units will permanently decrease on an international scale. If in 1950, a 65-year-old woman had 41 living relatives, by 2095, a woman of the same age will have only 25. These are the findings of a study coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), published in the journal of the American Academy of Sciences. The most drastic reduction is expected in South America and the Caribbean: in these regions, the average 65-year-old woman in 1950 had 56 living relatives, while by 2095, a woman of the same age will have just 18.3, marking a 67% decline. In North America and Europe, where families are already relatively small, the changes will be less pronounced, with a decrease from an average of 25 relatives in 1950 to 15.9 by 2095.
Alongside all this, the rise in single-parent families is evident and undeniable: according to research by the Pew Research Center, based in Washington, the United States has the highest number of single-parent households (23% of all families). This means that nearly a quarter of American children under the age of 18 live in a single-parent family. The second country is the United Kingdom (19%), followed by São Tomé and Príncipe, Russia, and Denmark. The only African country in the survey with over 15% of children living with single parents is Kenya. It’s important to note that these figures don’t include families where the single parent lives with their children and other people (relatives or friends), which immediately suggests that if these were accounted for, the numbers would be much higher.
New offices that become social places and houses that become workplaces with screaming children. Flexibility increases the need for a network of mutual help.
In any case, we are heading towards a world increasingly populated by people living alone: it sounds like a future revolution, but in reality, it’s already a bit of our present. Widows, singles, women thawing frozen eggs stored in banks and deciding to become mothers without a partner, single-parent families (which will grow from 2.7 million to over 3 million in twenty years). What matters, however, is that we will all choose to rely on a network that is incomplete, imperfect, but evolving: it will be the family we want, constantly changing. And it will be the one that protects us because we are learning to cultivate it every day. When we leave and change our lives, when we uproot and are reborn elsewhere, while still maintaining a dense network of reference points.
Stefania, Lucia, Mariateresa, Titti, Chiara: these are the names of the family I am cultivating, while I watch hordes of my friends’ parents abandon their 200-square-meter homes in the South— filled with dreams and grandchildren who never set foot in them—and move into new 38-square-meter apartments in the outskirts of a distant city, where their children and grandchildren now live.
These are the “reunifications” of expat grandparents, and they all reveal two major gaps in our society: support for young couples with children and care for the elderly, who lack social spaces and spend entire days in isolation. While there is plenty of data showing that the economic crisis following the pandemic worsened conditions for young families (today, one in two grandparents financially supports their children and grandchildren, acting as the cornerstone of “informal” welfare), much less is said about the elderly. “A new phenomenon has occurred,” explains Stefano Poli, a sociologist at the University of Genoa and author of Gli anziani che verranno (FrancoAngeli). “The fact that parents are moving reflects a cultural welfare system that is distinctly Italian and rooted in family ties. However, this time, the two generations are reuniting to address the issues linked to the growth of the third generation. In other words, while in the past people moved to receive care from their families, to - day they move to help their children as well.”
The unstoppable rise in retirees moving abroad has been ongoing since 2008. Every year, around 4,100 leave, with a third consisting of foreign workers, less than a third choosing countries like Switzerland and Germany to be closer to their children, and the remaining third opting for places like Spain, Portugal, and North African countries due to tax benefits and favorable climates. Migration varies, of course: the baby boomer who stays in Italy doesn’t experience the same difficulties as those who move abroad and lose the advantages of Italian residency (such as healthcare benefits). “The real novelty, however, is this” Poli continues. “If the individual is today’s basic unit of measurement, it’s also true that as individuals, we haven’t lost the ties and obligations toward the elderly. A separated woman with children always returns to her parents’ home, and vice versa. So, despite being heavily targeted, the family remains the bulwark that protects us. On one hand, welfare resources are dwindling, and on the other, families are breaking down into micro-units.”
“Who still goes to eat at their grandparents’ house on Sundays to reconnect with cousins like in the past? Very few. Yet, for me, protecting the family remains the only solution until we find an alternative. Maybe a family expanded to include the neighborhood. Who knows? What matters is that we urgently need to rethink it,” concludes the speaker. Enter the concept of the “neighborhood”: a network that could precede the retirement-stage option of social housing. The homemaker on the first floor becomes the nanny on Monday afternoons, the retiree on the top floor fixes the boiler and stays for dinner because he’s a widower and good company. And the grandmothers? Some will continue to support their son’s young family full-time, caught between the high cost of living and insufficient services. Others will do so part-time or on demand, having become the trailblazing baby boomers of a new “grandparent trend,” where relationships with younger generations are different— of higher quality, and not just out of necessity.
We want to be free to choose our relatives, but also our time: time for ourselves, for work, for our grandchildren, for a life that has, thankfully, lengthened
The situation is this: Italy is a country where workforce participation among those over 55 continues to rise steadily, absolute poverty for this age group has been halved in less than twenty years, and the country maintains its lead in having the highest proportion of over 65s in the EU (23.5%). More than half of these individuals see their grandchildren on a weekly basis, and 60.4% of them help care for grandchildren when both parents work (according to Istat). However, this percentage will likely decrease. And not just because laws like the Fornero Law require women to stay in the workforce longer. “A woman, after a lifetime of work, has the right to choose how to manage her days, doesn’t she?” asks Silvia Vegetti Finzi, a psycho-pedagogist, grandmother of three, and at an age where she could technically retire. “I work from morning to night because it makes me feel alive. My rest is doing what I enjoy. Besides, I feel like I still have something to say, and I don’t want to give that up.”
“The youngest granddaughter is twelve, and of course, I’m available if needed, but I also support a more active role for grandparents—meaning the right to help organize family life according to our availability, while also respecting our right to say no. The idea that grandchildren are always best of with their grandparents is pure rhetoric”, adds Vegetti Finzi, author of Nuovi nonni per nuovi nipoti. La gioia di un incontro (Mondadori). “That said, if working until 67, as the Fornero Law suggests, can help make grandparents less ‘obligated’ by their children to manage the grandchildren, then that’s fine. But if someone prefers to stop working earlier, they should still have the right to do so because our energy levels are different as we age,” she concludes. In essence, we want the freedom to choose not only our relatives but also our time: time for ourselves, for our grandchildren, and for work—until we decide to stop. Time for life, which, fortunately, has become longer.
It’s a story of “blurring boundaries,” we might conclude. The margins of family stories are thinning, dissolving, making room for new figures— friends, neighbors, fluid grandchildren, parents who winter with their children in London and return to the village in summer. The key word, however, is net—the network. Each of us will build our own, from city to city, and within it, we’ll feel protected. In the meantime, we need to get better at trading a bit of individualism for trust in others. Call it solidarity. Think of other words if you wish. After all, we need a new family lexicon—or perhaps we already have it.
Rossana Campisi
Sicilian by birth and Milanese by adoption, she is a long-standing journalist and expert in female work-life balance issues. She published Partorirai con dolore (Rizzoli) on the subject of pregnancy in the Italian healthcare system.