Doing Nothing, Redefining Care: Youth Non-Reproductive Choices and Agency

The gap between the average number of desired children (around 2) and the total fertility rate (1.24) in Italy is mainly interpreted as the result of structural dimensions (inefficiency of the labour market, lack of family policies, scarcity of housing and youth policies) and contingent ones (e.g. the Great Recession, the economic crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic). At the same time, it is apparent that an increasing proportion of young people do not wish to have children and/or see the parental experience as irrelevant to their self-fulfilment.

Youth non-reproductive choices – or their “doing nothing” in the reproductive sphere - often become a focal point for blame and intergenerational conflict. From an adultist and adult-centred perspective, these choices are seen as a sign of selfishness, hedonism and immaturity. This viewpoint particularly influences the public discourse, which tends to blame young people – especially young women - for the declining birth rate, now at an historic low. However, from a youth-centred perspective these choices can be read as a different way of caring for oneself, the others, and the planet. The non-reproductive discourse is linked to emerging new definitions of caring that transcends biological and family boundaries, emphasizing the social responsibility to care for others within the community, as well as to the environmental discourse.

Understanding youth choices not just as individual decisions, but as expressions of agency that opens new perspectives on both their personal futures and the collective future, the paper explores childless young people’s position within the current generational and gendered order. Drawing on two ongoing studies on the reproductive and intimacy ideas, expectations, desires, fears of childless young people aged 25-34, it asks how the blaming discourse affects both young women and men, and how they, in turn, re-signify their non-reproductive choices.