Dear children, how much do you cost us. Between clothes, school books, sports, transport and free time, on average one third of the total expenditure of Italian families.
When everything goes well: because for a third of families, spending on children represents between 40% and 70% of the family budget. This is what emerges from the FragilItalia Report ‘The cost of children’, elaborated by Area Studi Legacoop and Ipsos, according to which to cover these expenses, “6 parents out of 10 are forced to give up shopping for themselves, go to restaurants and reduce their holidays”.
“Families are the crucial structure of our society. Aging, negative demographic trends, dysfunctionality of the labor market, lack of inclusion of women in economic processes for direct and indirect reasons, cost of welfare, social and territorial inequalities: all these issues and others still, ultimately, they depend on the costs of raising and maintaining a family”, explains Simone Gamberini, president of Legacoop.
“To address the country’s imbalances, policies are needed that support them, inspired by a concrete approach to providing answers to people’s problems.”
A need that clearly emerges from the detail of the research. In fact, about half of Italian parents have cohabiting children and in the case of adult children, almost half (47%) are totally dependent on their parents, while 29% work contributing to the family expenses. It should be noted, however, that 24% of adult children, although working and not weighing on the family budget, continue to live with their family, “a clear sign – Legacoop and Ipsos underline – of the persistent difficulty of young people to be able to face the cost of renting or purchasing an independent home.
At the top of the list of items that have the greatest impact on expenses are clothing (63%), school textbooks and books (51%), shoes, bags and accessories and sports activities (48%), meals out (46%), followed by medical expenses, entertainment and mobility (all 45%). Four out of ten (41%) indicate school, university and nursery fees. Among the age groups and geographical location, expenses for children weigh, above all, on the family budget of parents under 30 and residents of the islands.
But it is often the children who have to make sacrifices when, for economic reasons, families are forced to cut expenses. In particular, 37% have had to give up clothes and shoes and a new smartphone, 30% going out with friends, 25% a study trip abroad, 23% enrolling in the course of study they wanted. The children who are forced to make the most sacrifices for economic reasons are those of parents under 30, those living on the islands (where the sacrifice of a smartphone reaches 50%, study trips abroad 37% and enrollment in the desired course of study 33%) and those from the working class.
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