Tomassini (AISP) ad Business: “In Italy single-person families are growing. The government is revolutionizing the welfare system”
What does “family” mean? Is there a universal definition? Is it right that the State decides what is meant by family nucleus? Not new questions, but always current. Just think of the recent introduction of the “universal crime” of gestation for others (rented uterus, ndr). Or again the controversy around the decision of the Lazio Region to revoke the patronage of “Roma Pride”. Family, then, or families? And are there practical implications to what might seem like only a theoretical debate?
AISP population report (Italian Association for Population Studies). The research (Mulino, 2023) is dedicated to families, in the plural. “The time has come to think about a new organization of society, based on a different idea of the family”, write the demographers Cecilia Tomassini and Daniele Vignoli in the introduction to the research.
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Affaritaliani.it he actually asked Cecilia Tomassiniprofessor at the University of Molise and president of AISP, to try to answer all these questions.
Tomassini, would you like to tell us what “family” is?
There is a plurality of definitions, the more traditional one given by the Constitution, or the more personal one given by Istat, for which the family is understood “as a set of people habitually residing in the same house and linked by ties of marriage, kinship, affinity, adoption, guardianship or emotional ties”.
All these definitions mean everything but they also mean nothing. They depend both on the context in which they are found, and on the function that the institution performs. One thing is certain: the numbers describe a different reality than in the past.
What do the numbers and statistics tell us?
What emerges is that in the last 20-30 years our idea of family is changing a lot, revolutions have taken place in form in Italian families. Marriage is no longer the event that legitimizes the beginning of sexual life, there are cohabitations, unions between Italians and foreigners, those between partners of the same sex, are growing. There are also stable relationships but between people who live in different places (the LAT – living apart togheter, ndr). We are witnessing a growth in single-person households, to the detriment of those with children: 33% vs 30%. The number of family members is also changing: it has gone from an average of 2.7 to 2.3.
But the number of families, however you want to understand it, has increased, from 21 to 25 million. That’s why, in the end, what it feels like to be a family matters.
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