Contact between adult children and their divorced parents: Italy in a comparative perspective

This paper, based on a Multipurpose survey on a large national sample of Italian households which has made possible to analyse parent-child and grandparent-child dyads, explores the impact of marital instability on relationships with adult children and with grandchildren. As in other countries, the impact is more negative in the case of divorce than in case of widowhood and, in both cases, more negative for men than for women. It affects the threegenerational relationship and is not compensated by stronger horizontal kinship ties. The impact is most negative in the case of contacts, while in the case of material support it is more neutral and even positive for widowed parents, confirming the strong role played by need in Mediterranean countries in the case of the latter. Not only divorce/separation, also remarriage has a negative impact on intergenerational contacts. And in this case the impact is stronger for women than for men. An exploratory comparison with countries where divorce rates are higher and have a different gender culture suggests that although the impact of marital instability is negative in both cases, its intensity is higher in Italy. These results offer new insight into the working of strong family ties. These ties, particularly in the case of men, are more vulnerable to the dissolution of marital bonds than in countries with weak family ties. Finally, family ties are strongly mediated and constructed by women and through relationships between women. When a mother is no longer present alongside the father, even in the case of widowhood, fathers and grandfathers risk weakening the intergenerational link. --

Towards an integrated approach for the analysis of gender equity in policies supporting paid work and care responsibilities

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework for analysing the degree to which public policies support gender equity in paid work and care. Combining the distinction between commodification and decommodification and the distinction between defamilialisation, supported familialism, and familialism by default our study identifies a number of relevant policies, ranging from services, leave entitlements, income support measures, and fiscal instruments to forms of acknowledgement of care work in pension systems. Although our main objective is conceptual, we offer a comparative overview of these policies for all of the EU countries, plus Norway. Thus, we provide a preliminary typology of policy approaches.commodification, decommodification, defamilialisation, familialism, gender, social policy

Varieties of familialism: comparing four southern European and East Asian welfare regimes

The aim of this article is to articulate the concepts of familialism and defamilialization as well as their indicators to assess whether and how welfare states, or regimes, differ not only in the degree to which they are defamilialized but also in the specific familialism form. In other words, it assesses whether family responsibility in a given area (and its gender dimension) is only assumed without public policy support or, on the contrary, whether it is actively enforced by laws or supported by income transfers and time allocation. The same diversification also exists for the opposite concept, defamilialization, which may happen through positive, direct or indirect policy interventions or because of the lack of such interventions, encouraging recourse to the market. The article shows that when considering these distinctions in the analyses, the profiles of countries that are usually generically described as ‘familialistic welfare states’, such as Italy and Spain in Europe or Japan and Korea in East Asia, and their similarities and differences partly differ from those that emerge when considering only a simplified familialism – defamilialization dichotomy, in so far both familialism and defamilialization may occur, and be combined, through distinct means, offering, therefore, also different options

The time structure of biographies

Introduction There is a way of viewing social change as resulting primarily from the diversity of organization, development and meaning of the individuals’ life courses over successive time periods. This was discussed by Mannheim in his famous essay on the generations, from the standpoint of cultural patterns, and has been recently taken up again by demographers and sociologists. The latter use the cohort concept to mean a set of individuals born within the same time span, and therefore facin..

The impact of cohabitation without marriage on intergenerational contacts: a test of the diffusion theory

"In the literature, cohabitation rather than marriage is presented as an indicator of weakening intergenerational ties, either as a cause or an effect. In this paper we compare the frequency of face to face and phone contacts between parents and their married and unmarried children living with a partner in two countries - Italy and the UK - where the incidence of cohabiting instead of, or before, marrying is very different. Our analysis of empirical evidence, based on an ordered category response multilevel model, does not support the hypothesis that in Italy, where cohabitation is still an exception, differences in parent-adult children contacts between cohabitant and married children are much greater than in the UK, where cohabitation is more common and since a long time. While in the UK cohabitation does not seem to have an impact on frequency of contacts, in Italy, cohabitation only increases the (marginal) proportion of those who do not visit and lowers slightly that of those who visit on a daily basis against weekly or monthly, but not the frequency of phone contacts. Also the hypothesis that duration of cohabitation makes a difference is not supported. The main difference we found is that cohabitant couples in Italy have a slight tendency to live farther away from their parents than married ones. This affects frequency of face to face contacts. These findings support the thesis that in both countries cohabitation and marriage are becoming increasingly similarly accepted patterns of partnership formation, which do not affect in distinct ways intergenerational relationships, although the differential residential choices of married and cohabitant couples in Italy remain an issue to be explained. Findings also support the thesis that, in Italy, cohabiting instead of marrying is still to some extent a polarized phenomenon: in the majority of cases it is supported, if not rendered possible, by parents, while in a small minority it is accompanied by estrangement." (author's abstract

Care: actors, relationships, contexts

ââ¬â¢Careââ¬â¢ (or ââ¬â¢caringââ¬â¢) is one of the contested concepts in the study of gender and social politics. As a concept and activity, care covers a number of different relations, actors, and institutional settings, and crosses conventional boundaries. It can pertain to family analysis, but also to labour market and welfare state analysis, to concepts and practices of work and citizenship, to issues of social inclusion and exclusion, and so forth. The article examines some of the crucial passages in the development of ââ¬â¢care thinkingââ¬â¢, viewing them not only as steps in a theoretíical process, but also as the outcome of shifts in contexts. Drawing mainly upon the Western European sociological and social policy discourses, and particularly on feminist literature, the following discusses care as a public and private responsibility, as relationships of labour, love and power, as personal responsibilities and social rights, and returns once more to considering care as a feminine dilemma