Volume 4 - Article 5 | Pages 133–162  

The banquet of Aeolus: A familistic interpretation of Italy's lowest low fertility

By Gianpiero Dalla Zuanna

Abstract

During the last fifteen years in the Western countries, the higher is the proportion of people aged 20-30 living in the parental home, the lower is fertility. In this paper I suggest that the familistic structure of family and society can help in understanding both these demographic behaviours, looking at the Italian case. Nevertheless, these patterns could hold in the strong-family area as a whole, i.e. the Mediterranean Europe.
The familism refers to some social norms managing the relationships among members and generations within the nuclear family and kinship. Direct and indirect connections between familistic norms and marital and reproductive behaviour are described, using data from several sources for Italy during the new demographic transition. Finally, I argue that the triumph of the familistic society could be a pyrrhic victory, because the native Italian population risks being unable to reproduce itself.

Author's Affiliation

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

The growing number of given names as a clue to the beginning of the demographic transition in Europe
Volume 45 - Article 6

A synthetic measure of mortality using skeletal data from ancient cemeteries: The d index
Volume 38 - Article 65

First signs of transition: The parallel decline of early baptism and early mortality in the province of Padua (northeast Italy), 1816‒1870
Volume 36 - Article 27

Mortality selection in the first three months of life and survival in the following thirty-three months in rural Veneto (North-East Italy) from 1816 to 1835
Volume 31 - Article 39

Siblings and human capital: A comparison between Italy and France
Volume 23 - Article 21

Comparisons of infant mortality in the Austrian Empire Länder using the Tafeln (1851-54)
Volume 22 - Article 26

Social mobility and fertility
Volume 17 - Article 15

Interdependence between sexual debut and church attendance in Italy
Volume 14 - Article 19

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

The Spanish flu and the health system: Considerations from the city of Parma, 1918
Volume 47 - Article 32    | Keywords: health system, individual-level sources, Italy, mortality, Spanish Flu, urban demography

Gender and educational inequalities in disability-free life expectancy among older adults living in Italian regions
Volume 47 - Article 29    | Keywords: disability, gender, health, inequalities, Italy, mortality, older adults, regions

Disentangling the Swedish fertility decline of the 2010s
Volume 47 - Article 12    | Keywords: childbearing, fertility, fertility decline, fertility trends, Sweden

Going "beyond the mean" in analysing immigrant health disparities
Volume 47 - Article 7    | Keywords: decomposition analysis, health inequalities, immigrants, Italy, unconditional quantile regression

Diverse pathways in young Italians’ entrance into sexual life: The association with gender and birth cohort
Volume 46 - Article 13    | Keywords: Italy, relationships, romantic love, sequence analysis, sexual intercourse, students, universities

Download to Citation Manager

Volume
Page
Volume
Article ID