The Nonna State
Move over, Tiger Moms. In the beaten-down economies of Italy and Spain, the force to reckon with is the army of grandparents who form an invisible safety net helping young people make ends meet.
By ALESSANDRA GALLONI
Like most grandparents in Italy, Isidoro and Antonietta Arcidiacone were thrilled to help out when their daughter, Grazia, and her husband started a family 2½ years ago. They got more than they bargained for.
The 67-year-old retired police officer and his wife have taken their daughter's family back into their one-bedroom apartment in Rome. Mr. Arcidiacone takes his two toddler grandsons to the playground and pediatrician. Ms. Arcidiacone makes homemade gnocchi and peels the skin off grapes so the boys don't choke. This summer, the extended family is decamping to the grandparents' native region of Calabria, in southern Italy.
"Mamma and papà are fundamental. We couldn't cope without them," Grazia Arcidiacone, a smiley 36-year-old brunette, said on a Saturday morning as she sat in her parents' kitchen cuddling 14-month-old Francesco.
Photos: Grandparents To The Rescue
Nadia Shira Cohen for the Wall Street Journal
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Isidoro Arcidiacone and his grandson Lorenzo, 2 years old in the park.
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The Arcidiacones are part of Southern Europe's unheralded social safety net—an army of older family members who are helping younger generations make ends meet during the region's crippling economic crisis. Half of all abuelos, or grandparents, in Spain take care of their grandchildren nearly every day, and 68% of all children under 10 in Italy are looked after by their nonni when not in school or with parents, according to official numbers. By way of comparison, 19% of preschoolers in the U.S. were taken care of primarily by grandparents while their mothers worked in 2010, according to Census Bureau figures.
Here it isn't just baby sitting. The number of 25-to-34-year-olds living at home with mom and dad in Italy is rising—it was 42% last year, compared with 33% in 1994—and most say they can't afford otherwise. "Until 2009, staying at home was a choice," says Linda Laura Sabbadini, head of social affairs at Italian statistics agency Istat. "Then, staying at home started becoming a necessity."
![[NONNI1online]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/P1-BG714_NONNI1_NS_20120620163003.jpg)
Family has long been the glue of Southern European society, and intergenerational help has deep historical and religious roots. Catholicism and the Muslim influences that infuse the continent's Mediterranean rim eschew the individualistic nature of Protestant Northern European and Anglo-Saxon countries. For Americans, admitting to extensive parental help is embarrassing, while lingering at home or asking mom and dad to shoulder the burden of child care is perfectly acceptable in Italy.
The family state isn't just cultural, says Katherine Newman, an authority on the working poor and economic mobility at Johns Hopkins University. In modern times, family ties have compensated for welfare systems that aren't extensive or efficient enough to help needy populations. Northern European countries spend far more on social services, excluding health care, than their southern neighbors, and it is no coincidence that in countries such as Denmark, Sweden and Norway, intergenerational bonds are weaker than in Italy and Spain.
"Where there are weak welfare states, the structure of familial support is high because people have to rely on private resources," says Ms. Newman, who studied multigenerational families across six countries for her new book "The Accordion Family."
Yet the all-in-the-family model is one of the many social patterns that Europe's economic overhauls threaten to unravel.
In Southern Europe, parents of today's 20- and 30-somethings can help out largely because older generations of women rarely had jobs. When they did, they quit early thanks to generous early-retirement schemes. In 2010, only 36% of those aged 55 to 64 worked in Italy, compared with 70% in Sweden and more than 60% in the U.S., according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But as indebted governments across Europe put a lid on pension spending, they are pushing people to work longer. By 2018, for example, women working in both the public and private sectors in Italy will have to work until age 66 to receive a pension. Last year, the legal limit was 60—and much earlier in some cases. That means older family members will be less available to help.
Younger family members have also been able to depend—financially and physically—on their parents because of labor laws that gave virtual lifetime job guarantees to older generations. But now both Italy and Spain are starting to dismantle those laws, so a single breadwinner won't necessarily be able to support multiple generations. In Spain, the percentage of households where the principal breadwinner is unemployed reached a historic high of 12.4% this year.
The new legislation is aimed at giving young people more opportunities. But it also means workers may have to leave their family orbit to find jobs, prying loose those generational ties that Europe's hard-pressed youth are relying on. It is a big change in a region where people have traditionally been reluctant to pack up and move, even when it has hampered their chances at prosperity.
"Family has limited the impact of the recession on our society," says Anna Maria Tarantola, deputy director-general of the Bank of Italy. "But it's a Band-Aid. It's clear that this model can't last into the future."
Family help takes many forms in Southern Europe. Care of parents, for example, is generally kept in-house; a lower proportion of the elderly are in institutions in Italy than in most other European countries. But few areas of intergenerational help are as heartfelt as child care. Parents are generally distrustful of sending toddlers to day care or even leaving them with baby sitters if they don't have to.
"Parents are best, but grandparents are second-best," says Teresa Jimeno, a 44-year-old schoolteacher in Madrid, who relied on her parents to take care of her two sons before they started going to school at the age of 4. In later years, her parents would arrive at her house early in the morning as she was leaving for work to give the kids breakfast and take them to school. "I can't even imagine how much money they saved me," she says.
: Isidoro Arcidiacone with his grandson.
Southern Europeans' cultural preference for grandparent care means politicians and companies have had little incentive to introduce the sort of day-care facilities and flexible work schedules that have enabled mothers to work in Northern European countries, says Daniela Del Boca, an economics professor at the Collegio Carlo Alberto, University of Turin, who studies the effects of family structures on mobility and growth. As a percentage of gross domestic product, Italy and Spain spend less than half as much on child care and pre-primary-school services as do France, the U.K., Denmark or Sweden, according to the OECD.
The availability of extensive state-paid child care is one of the key reasons that 72% of the total female population in Denmark and 60% in France is employed, compared with 53% in Spain and 46% in Italy.
Kjell G. Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration says the reason family ties are weak in Northern Europe is that Scandinavians have long been moving away from their families to seek jobs. As a result, the only way successive governments could ensure equal labor opportunities for women was by helping to take care of the kids. In addition to historical and cultural reasons, Mr. Salvanes attributes Norwegians' tendency to pick up and move to the country's high level of spending on education. "Education means you can seek a good job anywhere, so it makes you move."
In Italy and Spain, the void created by the lack of day care has been filled by grandparents, helping to fuel a major increase in women's employment over the past 20 years.
Gabriella Garuffi, 66, retired from her job as a public-sector employee with full pension benefits when she was 37, thanks to a now-defunct Italian law introduced in the 1970s that allowed women with children to retire with as little as 14½ years of work.
The so-called baby pension allowed Ms. Garuffi to raise her daughter Cecilia. When her granddaughter was born in 2008, Ms. Garuffi and her husband became full-time caregivers, watching Emma all day. Their help allowed Cecilia, now 38, to keep working as a family-law attorney in Rome, while her husband was employed in Milan. "It's the only way Cecilia could keep working, and we were happy to do it," says Ms. Garuffi.
It is a scenario that is not likely to play out in the future. European Union rules require member states to raise their retirement ages in order to rebalance a system that, because of rising life expectancies of retired workers, is weighing on younger working populations. In 2022 in Italy, the retirement age for both men and women will be 67, according to the government's new law.
Among those who won't be as available to provide family support are the parents of Giulia Voci, a 26-year-old economics graduate from the University of Rome. Ms. Voci currently relies on her parents to pick up the tab for her 18-month-old son Tommaso's roughly $620-a-month day care bill and help baby-sit some afternoons. The help is crucial, because Ms. Voci uses her almost $900-a-month salary working for a gift-voucher company to split household costs with her partner, who works for his family's hotel business.
But Ms. Voci's parents—a psychiatrist and finance-ministry official who are both 56—are facing longer working lives now. Up until last year, the elder Ms. Voci could have retired in four years; now she's likely to have to work another decade. "I'm lucky because they are there for me and can help me financially," says Ms. Voci. "But they'll be busy working for a long time."
Ultimately, weaning Southern Europe off its family reliance may turn out to be a good thing, says Alberto Alesina, an Italian-born Harvard University economist. Mr. Alesina says that attachment to the family has been one of the culprits behind Italy's stagnant economic growth of the past decade because it has often prevented workers from moving to where the good jobs and higher wages are.
"Family has helped young people withstand the crisis, but it has stood in the way of their long-term future," says Andrea Ichino, a professor of economics at the University of Bologna who co-wrote a book with Mr. Alesina called "Home-Made Italy."
Grazia Arcidiacone acknowledges that family support has been a double-edged sword. A few years ago, she was making $600 a month at a part-time job as an administrative assistant. Her parents' daily baby sitting allowed her and her husband to save on a day-care bill for their first son, Lorenzo, that would have cost as much as her salary.
Then Grazia lost her job while she was pregnant with her second child, Francesco, last year, and her parents took the whole family into the home where Grazia grew up. That helped the family to get by on Grazia's husband, Simone's, $1,500-a-month salary as an employee of a restaurant food supplier.
There are drawbacks for both generations. The older Arcidiacones sleep on a rollaway bed in the living room, ceding their bigger bedroom to Grazia's family. And like many families in Italy, three generations are relying heavily on Mr. Arcidiacone's $2,500-a-month pension. Grazia and Simone rarely get time alone.
"I'm happy to help out. But it's very tiring," says the elder Ms. Arcidiacone, who is 66 and is often seen bustling about on her kitchen balcony, telling Lorenzo not to throw his socks into the courtyard below. "I've practically raised these two kids."
Grazia has signed up with Italy's national unemployment agency in the hope of finding another job. Her dream is to set up a small botanical garden for children. Lower real-estate and labor costs would make it easier for her and her husband to do that in Calabria, she says, but they aren't keen to leave Rome.
"I know we really should leave my parents' house," she says. "But it seems too hard right now."
Write to Alessandra Galloni at alessandra.galloni@wsj.com
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