The alarm about the ‘disappearance of young people’, who all too often choose to move across borders, is accompanied by the social and economic fragilities affecting the new generations. 74.1% of young adults still living in their family of origin are in a low or medium-low socio-economic status. This is the starting point for the Cisf Family Report 2025, which investigates the psychological and relational well-being of Italian families through the results of a survey conducted by the company Eumetra on a sample of 1,600 subjects.
The share of young people still living with their parents in medium-low social and economic conditions is much higher than the average share of respondents living in the same situation, at 45.6 per cent. “This result,” says the director of the International Centre for Family Studies, Francesco Belletti, “is an indirect confirmation of the condition of economic marginality of the new generations, for whom the family continues to represent the only real system of social protection. Weighing on the difficulty of realising the project of independence is too often a precarious or poorly paid job.
Almost as a reaction, in order to cope with economic vulnerability, the ‘economy of renunciation’ is growing: 32.5 per cent of the households surveyed had to give up spending on personal well-being and leisure; 32.4 per cent on housing costs; and 18.5 per cent on health care costs.
The report also focuses on the difficulties faced by the ‘sandwich generation’ (today’s 40/50-year-olds), which is strongly exposed to critical issues between the youngest and the oldest: almost one in two families with children (42.6%) is also affected by caregiving duties towards non-self-sufficient family members; among these, 53% state that they feel overwhelmed more frequently by caregiving responsibilities than parental duties. “Family support is taken for granted,” Belletti adds, “and this generates a compression that risks crushing the resistance of the middle generations. Moreover, the progressive thinning of family networks reduces caregiving capacities’.
Finally, from the point of view of health, psychological wellbeing worsens: while more than a third of the sample (35.2%) report at least one health problem, 60% say they suffer from anxiety and stress (24.9% ‘often’; 37.3% ‘sometimes’). Personal and family health problems are the cause for 45%, economic problems for 34.7%, and work-related problems for 32.2%.
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