The photos of Samantha Cristoforetti, 45, who in an astronaut suit sends a kiss to his children before leaving on his second space mission. Cristoforetti will stay in orbit for five months and the children – 5 years and a year – will stay with their father Lionel Ferra. The emblem of a new concept of motherhood, cleared day after day by women who are fulfilled in the family but also at work, in sport, in their passions.
Yet the numbers tell us that the complexity of creating a family has increased and at the same time that women can make different choices. Thus in 2021 births in Italy fell to an all-time low: not even 400,000 new borns, down by 1.3% compared to 2020, according to Istat. The average age at childbirth rose to 32.4 years, the highest in Europe and the average number of children per woman is 1.25, compared to an average EU rate of 1.5. But despite the economic instability, the wage disparities, the difficulty in reconciling life and work, the desire and the tools there are, as four women, professionals and mothers say: Veronica Diquattro, 38, manager and company executive with a past to Google, Spotify and now to Dazn; Giulia Bevilacqua, 43, actress and director; Julia Elle, 34, writer and entrepreneur; Elisa Di Francisca, 40, fencer and Olympic gold medalist in foil.
Veronica Diquattro
“I still remember when I walked into meetings and they thought I was the assistant opening the door for the boss,” he says Veronica Diquattro , who took a break after the birth of her Edoardo three and a half months ago. “Today there is greater openness and awareness to the richness of diversity, even if it depends on the sector and context – recalls the manager – but on a general level, interrupting work for the months of leave is still seen as an exceptional event, especially if you occupy positions of responsibility. But the months of motherhood are not lost months, they constitute a further moment of personal development and enrichment for the employee and for the company ».
Giulia Bevilaqua
The story of motherhood is changed by example and her generation is doing it in different areas, even if it is not always simple, as she says Giulia Bevilacqua , which underlines how in the show “motherhood is sometimes experienced as an illness, a handicap”. The actress, when she discovered she was pregnant with her second child Edoardo, had to give up some projects: «At that moment I was shooting a film, my eldest daughter Vittoria was 9 months old, I had just started working again. On the set they were very close to me, but in other environments I was less fortunate ». Over time, she learned to delegate and ask for help because she had reached “an incredible physical and psychological fatigue”.
Julia Elle
For the new generations, however, it is no longer a question of asking for help, from motherhood to shared parenthood. “Instead, we are the generation that is trying to move from a concept of motherhood to a concept of shared parenthood. We come from families where the care of the children was predominantly from the mother, but it is not the model we are replicating. We are a middle generation: shared parenting is in fact little understood by the generation that preceded us and is instead an aspiration for the next generation “he observes Julia Elle three children (Chloe 8 years, Chris 5 years and Chiara 7 months), who talks about parenting on social media with Desperamentemamma.