Newman - The accordion family: boomerang kids, anxious parents, and the private toll of global competition

Other books by Katherine S. Newman

Taxing the Poor: Doing Damage to the Truly Disadvantaged (with Rourke L. OBrien)

Who Cares? Public Ambivalence and Government Activism from the New Deal to the Second Gilded Age (with Elisabeth Jacobs)

The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (with Victor Tan Chen)

Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low Wage Labor Market

Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings (with Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth)

A Different Shade of Gray: Mid-Life and Beyond in the Inner City

No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City

Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream

Falling from Grace: Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence

BOOMERANG KIDS, ANXIOUS PARENTS, AND THE PRIVATE TOLL OF GLOBAL COMPETITION

Katherine S. Newman

BEACON PRESS BOSTON

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, Massachusetts 021082892

www.beacon.org

Beacon Press books

are published under the auspices of

the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2012 by Katherine Newman

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design and composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Many names and identifying characteristics of people mentioned in this work have been changed to protect their identities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Newman, Katherine S.

The accordion family : boomerang kids, anxious parents, and the private toll of global competition / Katherine S. Newman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8070-0743-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

E-ISBN 978-0-8070-0744-0

1. Parent and adult child. 2. Adult childrenFamily relations. 3. Competition, International. I. Title.

HQ755.86.N4888 2012

306.8740846dc23 2011027846

For Kathleen McDermott,

friend and fellow student of the

human condition for thirty-five years

Maria Termina and her husband, Alberto, live in the northwestern city of Bra in the Piedmont region of Italy. The people of Bra are traditionalists who struggle to hold the modern world at arms length. Proud to be the hometown of Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food Movement, Bra hosts a biennial festival that celebrates artisanal cheeses from around the world. This tiny, leafy, quiet town of less than thirty thousand people swells to more than one hundred fifty thousand when the cheese connoisseurs show up in full force.

Alberto Termina, now sixty-seven, has lived in Bra almost all his life and worked for the same firm as an engineer for about forty of those years. His wife, Maria, is fifty-seven. They have three children, and Maria has been a stay-at-home mother, taking care of the family since her daughter, Laura, was born. The Terminas youngest child, thirty-year-old Giovanni, has always lived with them and shows no signs of moving on. Giovanni graduated from the local high school but went no farther than that and is content with his steady blue-collar job as an electrician. He works on construction sites and picks up odd jobs on the side. Its a living, barely. His wages are modest, the building trades go up and down, andin all honestyhis tastes in motorcycles are a bit extravagant. Though he is a skilled worker, Giovanni knows he could not enjoy himself with his friends as he does if he had to support himself entirely on his own earnings. But since he pays no rent and can eat well at his mothers table, his living expenses are low, leaving money for recreation.

Maria cooks for the family, cleans Giovannis room, and provides advice when he asks for it, leaving the not-so-young man free to enjoy his passions, especially that motorcycle. The biggest expenses I have to take care of are for going out during the weekend, in the night, going out for dinner or travels and holidays, Giovanni explains. Life is sweet.

Laura, the Terminas oldest daughter, has also recently returned to the nest. Newly divorced, she and her five-year-old daughter moved home so that Grandma Maria could watch over her granddaughter while Laura goes out to work every day as an accountant. Resting in the bosom of her parents was a balm to Laura after the collapse of her marriage, and for now she sees no reason to plan for a future on her own.

Of the three children born to Maria and Alberto, only GiorgioGiovannis twin brotherlives on his own. Giorgio went further in school, completing a degree in economics at a local university and moving to Turin, where he works in marketing and statistics. He is the odd man out, not only in his family but among many of his familys neighbors. More than a third of Italian men Giovannis age have never left home; the pattern of delayed departure has become the norm in Italy. This has made the country an international butt of jokes about bambini who will not cut the apron strings, the so-called cult of mammismo or mammas boys.

It is no laughing matter in Italy, particularly in government circles where the economic consequences are adding up. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came out in support of the campaign against mammismo, having been elected on the promise of doing away with those hide-bound aspects of Italian life which inhibit dynamism and growth.

Why should government officialsincluding those whose own family lives are hardly worthy of admirationcare one way or the other where adult children make their home? The fact is that those private choices have serious public consequences. The longer these aging bambini live with their parents, the fewer new families are formed, and the evaporation of a whole generation of Italian children is knocking the social policies of the country for a loop. Plummeting fertility translates into fewer workers to fuel the retirement accounts in an aging society. The private calculations of families like the Terminas, who wonder how long they can support Giovanni, are becoming the public problem of prime ministers like the famously cavalier Berlusconi.

Are parents like Maria and Alberto listening to his advice? Surprisingly, no. Giovannis dependence once would have been seen as aberrant, even shocking. Maria and Alberto married in their early twenties, moved into their own home, and started a family almost immediately. Albertos job was steadynot uncommon in his generation of Italian menand although it did not make him rich, he rarely worried about unemployment. It was enough for Alberto to occupy the position he was born for: paterfamilias.

Its just as well that he wears this role so comfortably because it wont be ending any time soon. Alberto and Maria must now stretch their retiree pensions to cover the expenses of their adult children. Giovanni gives his mother about two hundred dollars a month, and Laura buys clothes for her daughter. Otherwise, responsibility for household costs is pretty much what it was when Giovanni and Laura were growing up. The tab falls to the Bank of Mom and Dad.

Does this delayed departure worry thirty-year-old Giovanni? Not really. Expectations are changing, and there is little pressure on him to be more independent. His family isnt urging him to marry, and he leans back in his chair and opines that nobody asks you the reason [why you stay] at home with the parents at [my] age nobody obliges me to move away.