Italy: the fastest aging western country

PIACENZA, Italy – On one side of a glass wall, three kindergarten children squeeze Play-Doh with plastic rollers. The other, three old ladies from a nursing home knock on the glass to get his attention.

“Say hello to grandparents,” the children’s teacher said before leading them through a door that connected the two rooms.

The children stopped to play with the magnifying glass of an 89-year-old woman who used it to read obituaries. Then the little ones, all aged 2, climbed into the elevator, where residents of a nursing home were waiting to read them picture books in a small library.

“It’s something extraordinary,” says one of the residents, Giacomo Scaramuzza, 100. “People think we come from two different worlds, but that’s not true. We are in the same world. And maybe I’ll give you something too. There is an exchange.”

An experimental project in the most renowned region of the country for early childhood education and care for the elderly, the elderly and children together of Piacenza aims to connect the vulnerable at both ends of life. But it also brings together Italy’s two existential challenges under one roof.

Italy’s population is aging and declining at the fastest rate in the West, forcing the country to adapt to a booming aging population that puts it at the forefront of a global demographic trend experts are calling the “silver tsunami.” But it faces a double demographic blow, with a sharply declining birth rate that is among the lowest in Europe. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said Italy is “destined to disappear” unless it changes.

This month, Meloni’s government approved a new “Third Age Pact” which she says will lay the groundwork for health and social care reform for Italy’s growing elderly population. “They represent the heart of society and a heritage of values, traditions and precious wisdom,” Meloni said, adding that the law would prevent the marginalization and “parking” of the elderly in institutions.

“Taking care of the elderly is taking care of all of us”he has declared.

According to experts, the reform adopted almost in its entirety a provision approved at the end of the previous government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi. And most importantly, he followed Draghi’s lead by putting legislation on the European Union’s recovery fund program and ensuring its implementation.

“It is the acknowledgment that lifelong care is a welfare policy,” said Cristiano Gori, who heads the Pact for a New Welfare of Dependent Persons, the umbrella organization that defended the law.

The new law, he said, would fix a system that is “a mess,” streamlining and simplifying government health care and social services, and engaging local and national government in the growing field of long-term care. At the same time, aims to keep older Italians in their own homes and out of institutions. A key innovation, he said, depends on funding from the Meloni government, but would give Italians the choice between unconditional cash benefits or larger contributions that would go to public assistance.

“The main problem is that there is no money,” Gori said. The hope, he said, is thatThe Meloni government, which has sold itself to voters as “family, family, family”, makes the program a real priority and finances it. But without more young people joining the workforce and contributing to the pension and social welfare systems, the whole system is at risk.

Meloni, who once ran for mayor while pregnant, is Italy’s first female prime minister and throughout her career has helped boost the country’s perennially low birth rate and make helping working mothers a priority.

But his detractors say his opposition to immigration – he has gone so far as to warn against “ethnic replacement” – harms population growth. And the Meloni government, held back by local bureaucratic problems, has already delayed a program for the construction of new nursery schools financed with 3 billion euros – about 3.3 billion dollars – of the EU recovery fund.

If Italy is not serious about encouraging young families and working women to have children, “it will always remain an aging country”says Alessandro Rosina, one of the leading Italian demographers and author of a “Demographic History of Italy”.

The combination of low female employment, flight of young professionals and families, little immigration, low birth rates and radically increased life expectancy amounts to a demographic disaster, she says.

The reality of the new gray world represents a litmus test for Italy, making it a laboratory for many Western countries with aging populations, according to some experts.

Some Italian regions hope to delay this demographic time bomb by extending the period in which older people can work, be self-sufficient and contribute, and not be an economic drain on society. The Piacenza center has tried to reinvigorate them with its precious resource for children. Before COVID closed the nursing home, the children of the center also ate and cooked with the older residents. Now things are reopening.

Children use the walkers in the corridor as race cars, transform a food truck into a pirate ship and play in the gym while the residents do their fitness routines.

“The most significant relationships arose by chance, when the child wanted to go up to the old man’s room, climb onto his knees and read a book”explains Francesca Cavozzi, 41, coordinator of the project. According to Cavozzi, the two extremes of life, who sometimes share unsteady gaits and a taste for juices, share the same space, which is a “first step” for older Italians to feel engaged and useful.

The center has aroused the interest of the academic world. University students have written theses on the intergenerational approach to life at the centre, which Cavozzi says is reminiscent of traditional Italian homes, with residents as breadwinners, staff as adults and children as children.

He hopes researchers will study the effects in the elderly, but also, over the long term, in children, to see if they become more sensitive to the elderly and vulnerable. But for now, he said with some astonishment, “it hasn’t been replicated in Italy”.

Although Italy slowly takes on the transformation that is coming, the problems it raises are not new.

When Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, the fascists immediately set to work to increase the birth ratestop emigration and increase the Italian population to 60 million (from 40 million) in 1950.

To address what it called Italy’s “problem of problems”, the regime introduced paid maternity leave, among other measures. But the obsession with the birth rate of a man who sided with Adolf Hitler, demographers say, had the effect of stigmatizing social policy on the problem, leading Italy to invest less in helping young families than in other post-war European countries.

In the 1950s, Italy’s economy boomed, as did its population, which became filled with young workers. But generations of leaders have largely failed to help Italians with programs like day care centers, prompting criticism that the country’s conservative culture was more interested in keeping mothers home to give birth than in helping women work and raise their children.

In November, Meloni, who has roots in post-fascist parties, encouraged couples to have children. and companies to hire women. It later announced a 50% increase in the “birth bonus” checks parents receive one year after giving birth and a 50% increase in benefits for three years for families with more than three children.

“We continue to look at today”, said Meloni, “without realizing that we will not have a tomorrow”.

But despite the billions of euros allocated by the European Union for kindergartens, Italy has postponed the start date of 1,857 kindergartens and 333 kindergartens, mainly in Italy’s poorest south. If Italy does not start building by the latest deadline, June 2023, it risks losing money.

Scaramuzza, a centenary, hopes some of the new day-care centers will share space with nursing homes, as does his own.

“Without having any children or grandchildren,” she said, “Here I have a large number of grandchildren”.

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