Posted on 12/26/2002 6:50:59 AM PST by twas
On a recent night at the Blue Elephant recreation center here, a clutch of parents watched adoringly as dozens of 3- and 4-year-olds sprinted through a colorful playroom, bounced on the cushioned floor or doodled on drawing pads, aglow with creative pride.
It was Italy as outsiders still imagine it: child-worshiping and family-loving.
But there was something wrong with the picture. Most of the parents were gazing at one, and only one, child. That was true of Gianluca Valenti, who said that giving his son any siblings would be too exhausting and expensive, and of Barbara Lenzi, who said that more than one child "doesn't seem to make sense."
It was also true of Rosa Andolfi, who responded to a question about having an additional child as if a vampire were near.
"Basta!" Ms. Andolfi more or less yelped, then made a cross with her index fingers and thrust it forward. That gesture was not just funny but telling; it touched on an increasingly worrisome reality for Italy and other European countries whose fertility rates have plummeted over the last decades, shifting one-child families close to the statistical norm.
In Spain and Sweden, Germany and Greece, the total fertility rate — or the average number of children that a woman, based on current indicators, is expected to give birth to — was 1.4 or lower last year, according to the World Health Organization.
In no West European country did the rate reach 2.1 — the marker that, demographers say, means an exact replenishment of the population. By contrast, the United States had a 2.0 rate, which demographers attribute to greater immigration.
While that trend has been evident for many years, its slow-building consequences are now coming into starker relief, as more West European countries acknowledge and take new steps to address the specter of sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces, surfeits of retirees and pension systems that will need to be cut back deeply.
In Italy, where the fertility rate last year was 1.2, according to the health organization, Labor Minister Roberto Maroni has announced that the cost of the state pension system will need to be reduced. Mr. Maroni said the government would offer incentives, which he did not specify, to keep people at work past the minimum retirement age of 57.
The United Nations recently published data suggesting that the population of Spain could decline to about 31.3 million in 2050 from about 39.9 million now. According to the World Health Organization, Spain's fertility rate last year was 1.1, the lowest in Western Europe. Many provinces in Italy's wealthy, well-educated north have rates well below that.
The rate in the province of Ferrara, which includes the city of Ferrara, has been under 0.9 for each of the years since 1986 that Italy's National Institute of Statistics kept track.
Ferrara officials talk about the dearth of young children in the streets, the closing of elementary schools over the last decade and a pervasive sense that something is missing.
"There's a lack of energy," Deputy Mayor Tiziano Tagliani said in a recent interview here. "The society is colder without children."
Nationwide, Italy's fertility rate has been so low for so long — under 1.5 since 1984 — that the country offers an especially good glimpse into the dimensions and dynamics of the trend.
For example, Italy now has the world's oldest population. The percentage of people 60 or older is 25, compared with 16 percent in the United States, according to the population division of the United Nations.
The division's experts project that by 2050, if current trends hold, 42 percent of Italy's population will be 60 or older.
Antonio Golini, a professor of demographics at the University of Rome, Sapienza, said that would be "unsustainable, from a cultural and even psychological point of view."
That sense of alarm was reflected in Pope John Paul II's first-ever address to the Italian Parliament in November. The pope said "the crisis of the birthrate" in Italy was a "grave threat that bears upon the future of this country."
In Italy, as in other West European countries, the low fertility rate is interwoven with an array of other issues — immigration, for one. While many people and many politicians in Europe would like to clamp down on the rising tide of new arrivals over the last decade, they may be forced to accept it, simply to fill jobs and maintain levels of productivity.
Europe stands out as the continent with the lowest fertility rates. The numbers are now starkest in East European countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Ukraine, each of which had a rate of 1.1 in 2001, according to the World Health Organization. (Its figures sometimes differ slightly from those of individual countries, but provide a yardstick.)
But the trend hit Western Europe earlier, and has had more time to produce hand-wringing and soul-searching. Apart from welcoming more immigrants, no one knows precisely what to do.
Many governments have expanded tax breaks for parents, child care alternatives or maternity and paternity benefits, acknowledging that a high cost of living and more women in the work force can be obstacles to large families. In some of those countries, like France, the fertility rate has nudged slightly upward.
Spain is considering a variety of ways to address those obstacles: cheaper utility bills for large families; assistance for young couples who are trying to afford homes; the creation of hundreds of thousands of new preschools and nursery schools; and longer hours for existing schools, an accommodation for working parents.
Although the Italian government provides mothers with nearly full salary compensation for about a half-year of maternity leave, the city of Ferrara, like several other north Italian cities, added benefits that kick in after that period. They include cash supplements of about $350 a month for mothers who want to stay at home an additional nine months. Ferrara also has pumped millions of dollars into nursery schools and child care centers like the Blue Elephant.
But Italy's low fertility rate persists, suggesting that the reasons go well beyond the arithmetic of salaries and schedules.
"People are studying longer, and thus are finding work later, when there is work, and then are marrying later, which doesn't necessarily mean having a baby anymore," said Valerio Terra Abrami, head of the department of social statistics for Italy's National Institute of Statistics.
Contraception and abortion are more readily available. Divorce is more common.
Moreover, decades of prosperity have altered people's assumptions and expectations. Older people once poised to look after grandchildren now pursue other activities and travel more. As for would-be parents, their attachments to leisure time, conveniences and indulgences do not easily accommodate multiple children — or sometimes, for that matter, any children at all.
"It's never been at the top of my list," said Teresa Ginori, 41, a fashion magazine consultant who lives outside Milan. "It's never been in the top 200 things."
Ms. Ginori and many women she knows have never married, in part, she said, because of a facet of Italian life that she cited as one possible explanation for the especially low fertility rate here.
Many Italian men, she said, live with their mothers into their 30's. When they marry, they are not prepared to help out at home in ways that take pressure off women, especially if those women want to have children.
"Even the most open-minded guy — if you scratch with the nail a little bit, there's the mother who did everything for him," she said. "I hate the mothers of these men. These mothers are a disaster."
Parents also seem to feel that they owe more opportunities to the children they do have, a conviction that discourages large families.
That partly explained the prevalence of only children in Ferrara, where one-child parents at the Blue Elephant center mentioned siblings who had also stopped at one child. The center's coordinator, Monica Viaro, 37, has only one child, an 8-year-old son.
Ms. Andolfi, 32, who has a 3-year-old son, said a second child would limit her son and limit the baby. She conceded that her family's definition of what it needed was expansive.
"The cellphones aren't enough and the televisions aren't enough," she said. "It's a little selfish."
Ms. Lenzi, 32, who is also part of a two-career couple, said she liked to read to her 3-year-old son, adding, "It doesn't make sense to have three just to tuck them in at night and say, `Ciao, stella,' and that's it."
Yes we are that selfish a Western culture. The government, especially the socialist professional bureaucrats of the US and Europe, are ferociously discriminatory against children, all under an astonishingly brazen cover-up that they do it all "for the children."
This explains the Left's lust for high taxes, amorality, abortion on demand, their systematic removal of all trace of religion from public life, etc.
There is an overwhelming pressure against children here, worse in the more socialist states of Europe. I remember this de-population problem first appeared in communist Eastern Europe in the 1960's. It has spread, like the plague it is, ever Westwards. Actually the Black Plague will ultimately be shown to be less deadly that this new plague of cultural suicide.
I know, its SICK. We are taxes so much and women have to work instead of staying home to build a family, and we have to pay for college etc so that children become an economic burden. Meanwhile in the third world, they have 6-8 children, and they dont even have to worry about supporting them, because good ol USA and Europe will feed them. No matter how many kids the third world has, we'll ship them enough grain, medicine, etc to take care of them, while our own nation goes extinct. When I hear leaders talking about the AIDS "crisis" in Africa which doesnt even make a demographic blip, while ignoring the genocide of historic proportions occuring here and in Europe, it makes me sick. I'm glad to see the New York times reporting this, I've been banging the drums on this issue for over a year, ever since I started reading UN birthrate statistics and realized the truth. I feel like Cassandra from Greek Mythology, destined to know the future, but ignored and powerless to alter it.
So many horrible events have come to together at once to wipe us out, birth control, abortion on demand, massive taxation/socialism making children a burden on those who work, radical feminism encouraging women not to have children, selfish materialistic men determined not to start a family, massive third world birthrates, a liberal media telling us we're morally obligated to work even harder, having less kids, in order to feed and clothe the third worlds 8+ kids per woman, massive immigration hiding the problem from us so that we don't realize it until it's too late.
Germany was turned around by military defeat in 1945.
The Perfect Storm is set upon us.
This is misleading terminology. I doubt that "fertility" rates have dropped, the Italians are probably just as "fertile" as they have ever been. It's the birth rate that has actually dropped as more people in developed countries practice birth control and abortion to prevent and eliminate pregnancies caused by their "fertile" state of being. The opposite of "fertile" is "sterile."
By definition, this issue only applies to non-white "human weeds." Margaret Sanger's heirs focus a lot of their abortion "service" marketing on minority communities, in faithfulness to her eugenics vision. The irony is -- the sword she forged to wield against the "lesser breeds" has decimated the liberal sophisticates.
Interesting point, Tom! The "religious fanatics" (us! ... and the Moslems) and the immigrants are still having children, while the "superior" types are disappearing from the landscape.
And I have to object to the "both parents must work" and "can't afford a large family" explanations. I know too many large families with one income (including us) to buy into that. They don't have everything the people with two jobs and one child have, but we all have homes, vans :-), food and clothing, zoo memberships, books for our kids, college scholarships when it's time for college ...
I sympathize, though, with the people who think it's impossible, because often a couple doesn't know anyone with more than two children. I was fortunate during a critical time, when we had our girl and boy and everyone expected us to be "done," to meet families with 6, 8, or 10 children who were happy and comfortable.
Three children is the hardest; after that it gets easier. I'm looking forward to having a full "staff" of 10, before I retire from the Baby Thing!
Plus Spanish isn't all that different from Italian ---those who won't learn English would be better off in Italy where they wouldn't have that much to learn.
That's the part that doesn't make any sense. The producers have to pay for all the immigrants and their children that they can't afford children of their own. Ending all welfare programs and lowering taxes would go a long way in solving the problems.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.