The time benefits of young adult home stayers in France and Italy: a new perspective on the transition to adulthood?

This article analyses how two co-residing generations contribute to the housework workload in Italy and France during the early 2000s. It studies the intergenerational exchange of time between young adults and their parents by indirectly comparing the level of domestic comfort enjoyed by young people in the two closely neighbouring countries. A focus on the reasons for staying in the parental home provides an explanation for the tendency of young Italian adults to prolong their stay in the family nest. The results of time-use surveys suggest that young Italians (especially young men) may benefit more than their French counterparts in co-residing with their parents. Beyond the compositional or structural effects, they perform fewer domestic tasks than their French counterparts, a result that is related to different cultural practices

Gender equity and fertility intentions in Italy and the Netherlands

Fertility levels have fallen drastically in most industrialized countries. Diverse theoretical and empirical frameworks have had difficulty in explaining these unprecedented low levels of fertility. More recently, however, attention has turned from classic explanations, such as women’s increased labour market participation, to gender equity as the essential link to understand this phenomenon. The increase in women’s labour market participation did not prompt an increase in men’s domestic duties, which is often referred to women’s ‘dual burden’ or ‘second shift’. Institutions and policies within countries also facilitate or constrain the combination of women’s employment with fertility. This paper provides an empirical test of gender equity theory by examining whether the unequal division of household labour leads to lower fertility intentions of women in different institutional contexts. Italy constitutes a case of high gender inequity, low female labour market participation and the lowest-low fertility. The Netherlands has moderate to low gender inequity, high part-time female labour market participation and comparatively higher fertility. Using data from the 2003 Italian Multipurpose Survey - Family and Social Actors and the 2004/5 Dutch sample from the European Social Survey, a series of logistic regression models test this theory. A central finding is that the unequal division of household labour only has a significant impact on women’s fertility intentions when they already carry the load of high paid work hours or children, a finding that is particularly significant for working women in Italy.fertility, fertility intentions, gender, paid and unpaid work

The Time Cost of Raising Children in Different Fertility Contexts: Evidence from France and Italy

This article provides an original comparison of the time cost of children for the parental couple and for each parent in two European countries\u2014France and Italy\u2014that differ in terms of structural and normative constraints. Using time-use surveys carried out in 2008\u20132009 in Italy and in 2009\u20132010 in France, it investigates how Italian and French couples\u2019 time use varies quantitatively according to the number and the age of their children. We estimate both the direct and indirect time cost of children and take into account the compression of the parents\u2019 free time. After controlling for numerous covariates, the results corroborate the hypothesis that Italian children have a higher direct cost for couples (especially those with a large family or with preschool children), but also for mothers and fathers separately. Faced with this huge burden of childcare time, Italian women adjust by substituting housework with childcare. The presence of children reduces parents\u2019 free time in both countries, but large families in Italy experience a higher and persistent loss of free time than in France. The gender imbalance in childcare is similar in both countries, but a more pronounced gender gap in time dedicated to domestic work is observed in Italy than in France. The loss of free time is always greater for women than for men in both countries, but in France, women\u2019s free time is only partially affected by the number of children, contrary to Italy

Fathers' time with children at the crossroads of the gender revolution: A comparative analysis in France, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

BACKGROUND According to recent literature the increasing women's labour market participation is only the first part of the so called gender revolution, while a second part is now unfolding, with an increased participation of men in family life with special attention to childcare. OBJECTIVE The aim of this paper is to explore fathers' involvement in parenting tasks within different contexts in terms of gender regimes, family policies, and workplace culture. The idea is to evidence individual factors that may enable/challenge the capability of fathers to stay with children and care for them, and to suggest opportune father-friendly policies. METHODS Time with children is compared among a sample of fathers in Time Use survey in France (2009-2010), Italy (2008-09), Sweden (2000-2001) and the UK (2000). Three different measures of father involvement are examined: the total time father spend with their children, the time they spend alone with them, and their engagement in childcare activities. RESULTS Results show that distinct micro-level factors contribute in determining the three levels of father's commitment analysed. Few cross-countries differences emerge. Fathers' involvement is mainly determined by their work-related features, by their children characteristics, and by their partner's working schedules. Weekday and weekend differences are observed. The quantum of father engagement strongly depends on the countries' institutional context: it is the highest in Sweden and the lowest in Italy. CONTRIBUTION This comparative study shows the methodological importance of considering different measures of father involvement to understand how micro-level factors influence the time fathers spend with their children in different institutional context

The legacy of Corrado Gini in population studies

This volume contains 12 papers that range over many different research subjects, taking in many of the population questions that, directly or indirectly, absorbed Corrado Gini as demographer and social scientist over several decades. They vary from the analysis of the living conditions and behaviours of the growing foreign population (measurements and methods of analysis, socio-economic conditions and health, ethnic residential segregation, sex-ratio at birth), to studies on the homogamy of couples; from population theories (with reference to the cyclical theory of populations) to the modelling approach to estimating mortality in adult ages or estimating time transfers, by age and sex, related to informal child care and adult care; from historical studies that take up themes dear to Gini (such as the estimates of Italian military deaths in WWI), to the application of Gini’s classical measurements to studying significant phenomena today (transition to adulthood and leaving the parental home, health care, disabled persons and social integration). The subjects and measurements that appear here are not intended to exhaust the broad spectrum of Gini’s research work in the demographic and social field (nor could they), but they can make up a part of the intersection between his vast legacy and some interesting topics in current research, some of which were not even imaginable in the mid twentieth century. Looking at the many contributions that celebrated Gini in Treviso and thinking about his legacy, it seems possible to identify at least two typologies of approach, to be found in this issue of the journal, too. On the one hand, there are contributions that aim to retrieve and discuss themes, methodologies and measurements dealt with or used by Gini so as to evaluate their present relevance and importance in the current scholarly debate. On the other, there are contributions that deal with topics that are far from Gini’s work, as they study very recent phenomena, but actually, among other things, make use of methods and indicators devised by Gini that are now so much part of the common currency of methodology, so they don’t require explicit reference to their Author

Childlessness and education: The case of Italy and Finland

The aim of this paper is to study the role of education as a micro-level determinant of childlessness in Finland and Italy paying attention to the role of union formation. We start from the hypothesis that when modeling the relation between childlessness and education, selectivity processes have to be considered. Our hypothesis is that education can affect childlessness, both directly, and indirectly, through its link with the union formation mechanisms; and that decisions on union formation and on parenthood can be considered as jointly determined. Thus, in order to understand how education can influence childlessness, it is important take into account the possible existence of common, unobserved factors that determine both processes simultaneously. We use Bivariate Probit Models to simultaneously model both union formation and childlessness mechanisms, and to understand which is the role education play in determining such mechanisms. We focus on Italy and Finland, which are characterized by very different institutional contexts, being at different development stages, but showing outstanding level of childlessness with a prevalence over 20% for the cohorts born in the sixties. The similar prevalence observed for the most recent cohort hides interesting differences in terms of childlessness path by education level: Italy shows a persistent positive educational gradient over birth cohort, while in Finland it has reversed, turning out to be negative among the most recent birth cohorts. In a comparative perspective, we are interested in understanding if the cultural and political-institutional context of countries can determine the way childlessness and education are related. We use data from the Finnish Late Fertility Survey 2015 and from the 2009 Multipurpose Italian survey, Family and Social Subjects. Results confirm that a positive education gradient in childlessness exists in Italy, even when taking into account the correlation between the preferences of women with respect to union formation and motherhood processes; while in Finland the negative education gradient reverses when controlling for this correlation as partnership market dynamics strongly influence the educational gradient in childlessness, whose existence is mostly due the difficulty low educated women encounter in finding a partner

How Much Does a Child Cost Its Parents in Terms of Time in an Aged Society? An Estimate for Italy with Time Use Survey Data

The high cost of children in terms of time is usually considered an important factor associated with low fertility, but no previous study tries to estimate empirically how large is the time cost of children for their parents in Italy and which proportion of the cost is paid by the mothers. Using a sample of 4,827 couples \u2013 childless or with at least one child under 13 \u2013 from the Italian Time Use Survey (2002\u20132003), this chapter provides an estimate of the time cost of children in an aged society, such as Italy. In particular, it investigates how Italian couples\u2019 time dedicated to childcare and unpaid and total work varies by presence, number, and age of children. The methodology is a loose adaptation of that used in microeconomics for the estimate of the monetary cost of children. OLS model results corroborate the hypothesis that Italian children are great time consumers. Ceteris paribus, parents\u2019 workload increases by more than 3 h a day when there is a child under 3. Time costs increase with the number of children, albeit less than proportionally, and decrease with the age of the youngest child. Most of these costs are borne by women. The proportion of incremental child cost paid by women increases as the age of the youngest grows (up to 75%) but usually declines with the number of children. In no case women pay less than 58% of the child cost