Blurring boundaries and clashing loyalties. Working and caring in Italy

The interaction between work and family over the life course in the Italian case can be seen as an extreme case of (inter) generational dependence and of (increasing) blurring boundaries between households within an “extended” family network. In Italy, combining family and work is possible only thanks to private (family or market) care-arrangements solutions. In the case of elderly care, given the meager development of care services, working and caring for an old parent is feasible mainly through the recourse to private paid migrant care workers, the “badanti”. From a gender point of view the recourse to a “badante” creates a type of care arrangement which maintains continuity with a traditional family (women) care model. In the case of childcare, dual-worker parents, especially when having “unfriendly working hours”, rely primarily on grandparents. The older generation is the main or complementary support for parents with young children, especially if the latter work on the basis of non-standard working schedules. Although formal and informal care resources mobilized as well as family constraints are very different in the two cases, as well as the values, norms and practices of care for children and for elderly parents, work-care arrangements highlight a high degree of interdependency between adult-children and parents, and between (grand) parents and adult-children. Two main questions are raised in comparing the differences and the similarities in work-care balancing for children and for the elderly: Who depends on whom (interdependencies)? Who lives with whom (boundaries)? The Italian chapter shows how the dependence from “others” (relatives, or paid workers that are to some extent considered as “quasi-kin”, in the case of “badanti”) tends to blur the boundaries between both households and families (parental home, parents in-law home, own home, care workers’ home). As a matter of the fact, these families, and within them, care givers and the cared of, experience the distinction and crossing of household boundaries at multiple levels: in the daily or weekly commuting between own family and the “other” family, between the “home parents rules” and his/her own rules, between different ideas, conceptions and attitudes on “education” and “care”. The analysis of work-family strategies for the Italian case shows that the direction of (inter)dependencies can be both vertical and horizontal. In childcare strategies the flux of help between households are mainly vertical one, from the top (generation) to downward. In elderly care the direction of dependencies goes in both sense vertical and horizontal one (given the relationship with the migrant care worker, and among siblings). Are the boundaries between households changing in the two different cases? The chapter shows that in the case of elderly care, in “patchworking” and recohabitation care-arrangement types the boundaries between households are more blurred than in the other types of care-arrangements, this depends on the intensity of care dependence and the stability of the care stage as well. Clashing loyalties? Different care-work strategies and the heterogeneity of solutions among our interviewed show that Italian care-givers have to handle a multiple level of loyalties (work and family, their own family and his/her parents, their partner and their old parents, their education model and parents’ educational model; their role as carer of young children and their “new” role as adult-children of a fragile parent). They have also to handle different generational location within their family experience, changed cultural expectations in being parents and (may be) unchanged cultural expectations in the role associated to being the care-givers of his/her parents. Here the main point is to look at the same time the adult-child parent relationship within the context of changing family and work and of a “new” extended duration and combination of generational roles in an ageing society.