Transition to Parenthood in Italy: The persistence of the “family care model"

This paper shows how dual-earner couples in Italy decide to balance work and family life across the transition to parenthood, and how they frame this decision with respect to their beliefs about mothers' and fathers' roles in doing "what is the best for the child". The paper is divided into 2 parts. In the first quantitative part, we reconstruct a baseline Italian scenario on prevalent women’s and men’s work and care behaviors around parenthood, with particular attention on the gender division of care, on attitudes towards family roles and judgments of fairness and satisfaction with the division of unpaid work. This analisys is based on two different data sets: “Indagine campionaria sulle nascite”, an ISTAT survey of a sample of mothers, carried on in 2002 and 2005 and “Modelli di equità 2008-2009”, a recent regional survey of a sample of 400 dual-earner couples living in Torino and in its surrounding area. In second part of paper, the focus is on first-time parents and their plans regarding gendered divisions of childcare tasks, leave taking, employment interruptions, working time adjustments. In this part we present a qualitative study based on 44 interviews conducted on 22 Italian working couples during their first transition to parenthood, aged between 26-45 and living in Northern Italy in the city of Turin and in its surrounding area. From our interviews emerges that ideals about what's the "best for the child" contribute to construct very different roles for fathers and for mothers and contribute to influence in very different way men's and women's job investment even among the most "egalitarian" couples. The main "care ideal" behind Italian working couples expecting a baby is that a newborn baby needs.