Paternity is the elephant in the room when it comes to empty cots

A few years ago, while I was training with my personal trainer in the small park near my home, a veiled girl—who appeared to be Pakistani—was sitting on a bench watching her son play when she was approached by the neighbourhood’s elderly, mentally unstable former catechist. The elderly woman, dressed in her customary attire, sat down on the bench and physically cornered her unsuspecting target. For several minutes, accompanied by repeated signs of the cross, she undertook to share the word of God with the Pakistani girl, who, though polite and clearly bewildered, confined her responses to vague nods and a compassionate smile. Only after some ten minutes of rambling did the elderly woman release her grip and head toward the park’s exit, visibly unsettled by the young woman’s imperturbability—for whom any possibility of sharing in Christ’s salvation appeared precluded.Faced with this utterly surreal scene we had witnessed, my personal trainer—vaguely laconic, as is often the case with those unaware of their own wisdom—looked at me, shrugged and said: ‘Yeah, right, you’ll understand; she’ll be Bangladeshi; she believes in stuff like cats.’ An observation, I must say, that I immediately felt applied to myself.In my own relationship with religion, I too feel a bit like that Bangladeshi girl: someone who believes in cats, never blessed with the gift of faith, never truly touched by Catholic spirituality. Despite this, however, I agreed, when the time came, to have my son G. baptised at my husband’s request. And so it was that, following the theory of the slippery slope, I suddenly found myself rushing up the absurd number of steps leading to Monreale’s Piazza del Duomo, and stepping into its cool magnificence, in stiletto heels and carrying a newborn whose spine wasn’t yet fully formed, at twenty-seven past midday, terribly late and right in the middle of the priest’s impassioned homily.

In the middle of a homily which, at first glance, appeared to be a severe reprimand.

The priest’s tirade, centred on the demographic decline (a demographic decline marked by a christening: groundbreaking), was directed primarily at young couples – evidently in contrast to those present at the ceremony, whose elegant clothes were smeared with various types of infantile discharge – who are devoted to hedonism and frivolous pleasures.

Couples who shirk responsibility, says the priest (whose name is Father Alfredo).

Couples who prefer dogs. So they say. Simple affections, devoid of structure or ethical value. So they say.

Couples who prioritise worldly ambitions – career, money and success – at the expense of parental love.

He says.

People who still want to have fun, and keep having fun, and stretch out this youthful enjoyment beyond all reason and for as long as possible, says Father Alfredo; ‘forties are the new thirties,’ he adds sardonically, ‘and thirties are the new twenties’ – ‘where will we end up at this rate?’ says Father Alfredo.

Mobile phones, fashionable clothes, travel.

I look at the newborn, I look at my husband, I look at the newborn again. ‘This priest’s got it in for me,’ I say to my son. He is admonishing me: an older first-time mother, a career woman, a fashion victim and even a ‘canara’ – do not take it personally, baby, but do you know how many times over the past few months, when I arrived at the office in the morning covered in drool and having had just two hours’ sleep, how many times I have told myself that, all things considered, I should have gotten myself a lovely Lagotto instead? She’s got it in for me – for having had children so long after establishing a brilliant career, and just as long after indulging in the earthly pleasures I was able to treat myself to; for having insisted on falling in love with a man before having a child with him.

Over the years that followed, I have often reflected on Father Alfredo’s homily.

I was thinking about him just a few days ago when, not wanting to put it off any longer, I picked up the thread of the interesting debate that followed the questionnaire launched by the activist Francesca Bubba and published by La Stampa, which sought to investigate the reasons why the women interviewed had decided not to have (or not to have any more) children.

What actually happened? What lies in the gap between wanting a child and then deciding against it? Or between having one and not having one?

Hedonism, certainly.

I am prepared to concede this point to Father Alfredo; I do not wish to contradict him – for it is true that, perhaps more than any other generation that has gone before us, our generation of thirty- and forty-somethings has sought earthly pleasure – and not just success or a career, Father Alfredo, I concede that too, but also, and above all, fleeting pleasures that are ends in themselves, superficial pleasures. We have fuelled a society of individualism and the cult of image, measurement and indefinite youth, gradually distancing ourselves from the natural course of biological and social ageing, from the toil of family life, and from emotional and physical sacrifice for the benefit of others.

We have enjoyed ourselves, Father Alfredo, and perhaps, for the first time in human history (I do not use this phrase lightly, as I believe it to be true), women too have taken this extended period for themselves – a time of enjoyment and light-heartedness, a time for experimentation and discovery. Not just for study or for a career – because, on closer inspection, that would be the duty-based aspect of the right to equality – but also for pleasure’s sake. The time when we want roses as well as bread, as my friend Lia says.

What the men had obtained somewhat earlier, we sought as well. We worked diligently; in the evenings we went to the pub; we stayed out late; in many cases, the children did not accompany us.

During my inner dialogue with Father Alfredo and while immersing myself in this debate, I suddenly had a revelation: I saw the elephant in the room.

The one thing missing from all these conversations about motherhood – which are, after all, conversations about motherhood and not about parenthood – is how much we women have wanted to work, we women, how much sex we’ve had, how much we’ve insisted on finding love and having a child with the man we love, how much we’ve wanted to be sure of it, how much we’ve dared to split up without children, how long we’ve waited, how much fertility we’ve wasted, before stopping and having a child – well, do you know who is never mentioned when we talk about the demographic winter?

Men. We never talk about men.

The man is the one who is conspicuously absent, the elephant in the room.

He is a man in his thirties or fifties. He has no children, or has often already had them – perhaps by mistake or out of weakness – earlier in his life.

Nor is he necessarily poor: this giant has a paid job, which he cares about – or cares about very much indeed – and he is not necessarily alone. He has a whole family of giant elephants of his own and lots of little elephant friends.

A home – at least a rented one.

A whole long string of plus-size girlfriends, some of whom were even long-term, stable relationships.

According to Istat, by 2025 there will be around 400,000 women who would have liked to have children but have not had any. That is a significant figure, yet it is still considered too low.

In my own personal statistics – the statistics of my little garden – I know many such stories and have witnessed the many years spent more or less timidly longing for children, asking for them, making plans, trying to understand, going back and forth, coming to terms with it, for heaven’s sake, arguing, splitting up and getting back together.

Why, in all this discussion about demographics, is there never – and I mean never – any mention of the men who do not want these children?

Why is there no mention of career men, ambitious men, or ageing fathers? Of men who want to avoid trouble, now that, in 2026, the running of the family is starting to be shared a little? Now that women too travel for work, just like the travelling salesmen of the 1950s?

I know a forty-year-old man – a handsome and highly successful man – who has enough money to support more than one extended family. This ‘elephant of a man’ believes he has no time to have children, as he is at the peak of his career. He wears an electronic wristband linked to a mobile app that measures his ‘effective age’ against his biological age – and he feels satisfied; he smiles modestly, but he feels happy, because this inanimate device tells him he is 38 years old, compared to his biological age of 46. The device measures his recovery, physiological load and sleep: the hours he sleeps, those in REM sleep, the good ones and the so-so ones. It measures his heart rate – at rest and when he’s stressed – his oxygen saturation, his respiratory rate, how often he urinates, his body temperature, when he needs a shave, his accumulated physiological cardiovascular load, the data he considers irrelevant, the colour of your faeces, your steps, your lifeline, your incorrect use of the subjunctive, your tics, and your mismatched ties.

An entire biological existence measured by an inanimate device, which returns data that is more or less comprehensible; the self at the centre of this comprehensive analysis of one’s own wellbeing – purely physical, needless to say – and where does one find the time to have children when the inanimate object tells you that, even as it is, you’re not exactly sleeping a great sleep and that you could exercise more to look two years younger.

The woman who spent fifteen years of her life with this posh elephant, who has a hundred blue suits in his wardrobe, is now 42 years old; she is still beautiful and has no children, though she would have liked some.

I know another one, a completely different sort – a left-wing man who takes little care of himself, with a long beard, who takes drugs once a week – with a certain method, mind you, just like in "Le conseguenze dell’amore" – he had a son by accident, who’s now fifteen, and with his second wife he’s been dithering, taking one step forward and a hundred back; now that he could take drugs once a week whilst the boy’s with his mum, and drink at his leisure whilst gazing wistfully at his glass, putting another obstacle between himself and the vermouth – I don’t know, let’s see if it works; assisted reproduction, no, there’s no magic there. He let himself be swept along; he didn’t hold back a certain sense of relief every time this second wife of his – beautiful and strong – stoically subjected herself to horse-dosed hormone treatments, operations and miscarriages, in a hospital gown and sunglasses on the clinic balcony waiting to be called, and all of it in vain. This man I know has made no secret of his satisfaction at all those pregnancies that did not come to anything. His second wife will adopt a child and be happy, whilst the radical little elephant will get high once a week, scrolling through Dagospia on his computer.

There is also another man, intelligent, with watery eyes and somewhat depressed, who kept the two most important women in his life waiting for years: the first, without having the courage to tell the truth – ‘I don’t want this, I hate my family of origin, I’m forty years old, I’m depressed and I haven’t even had a single day of therapy’ – the second, offering greater clarity but still not enough. Both women have children; they had them at 40 and 43, as their fertility was running out. They are two highly successful career women. Who knows how many people, knowing them only from a distance, have assumed that they put off motherhood for years simply to pursue their own ambitions.

Another: my father has a problem with his eyes, I have a problem with my eyes, my son would go blind – and when the separation became inevitable, once we were safe, I would have wanted to have a child with you.

I know an artist, a well-known artist, whom young girls look at and think of as sweet; an artist who has the air of an older brother and a carefree husband, whom young girls look at and think they’d marry him in a white dress and veil, Yet this little elephant of an artist is tormented and egotistical; he sleeps by day and writes by night; he has no room for a child – though he hasn’t said so outright either. His partner, who was the envy of the world, is so beautiful and so full of life that she will have this child.

The ‘Milanese baby elephants’ – a pair of brothers, both managers and womanisers – who, at fifty years of age each, are certain they still have time and will find a woman of childbearing age once they have exhausted all their whims. They are both highly likeable; charming and generous, and I regret including them in this list.

Another man, whose wife works too much to have children – he holds her in the highest regard, boundlessly so, but her life is too hectic, a mad life – his sister, for instance, she was right to have children; she’s a civil servant in a small, cosy provincial town, finishes work at 2.30 pm and her child’s nursery is a hundred metres from home (a civil servant in a provincial town with a nursery a hundred metres from home: a truly tiny fraction of the Italian – and indeed global – population; and then you talk about the demographic decline).

This is entirely legitimate, of course; the writer certainly does not feel at ease in the role of a sentinel standing watch and urging men to procreate – indeed, in many of the cases described, this would be entirely inappropriate.

However, one thing is true: these figures have never been mentioned in debates on population decline.

Whilst we are constantly presented with the hackneyed stereotype of the ambitious, middle-class woman who, at the age of forty, suddenly has a change of heart and, having put her own interests first, decides to have children, I have never seen a profile drawn up of the indecisive, individualistic man, terrified of emotions and responsibilities – the man who wants to keep sculpting his body as if he had sponsorship deals with million-euro penalty clauses, who devotes all his mental energy to his career, to money, or in other cases to self-pity, and who, in all this, finds no room for having children. Nor is there mention of the man who becomes a father well into his fifties—forty-year-old women, by contrast, are constantly held up as examples—who also has sperm that is not exactly in peak condition and the first signs of back trouble.

I have never come across a profile of the sort of man who, as it happens, shies away from fatherhood just when it becomes a matter for the couple, a shared responsibility. In other words, I often wonder: could it be that, after millennia in which men have fathered children in the purely unconscious belief that these little ones were, ultimately, their mothers’ problem, and thus with a certain sense of calm, with a lighter heart? I mean: could it be that birth rates have fallen partly because men are backing out, now that children are starting to be their problem too?

But is it really a coincidence that this demographic winter coincides, at its peak, with the first moment in human history in which women are demanding a 50 per cent division of family responsibilities, or at the very least active participation by men in the parental household? There is little mention of men amidst all this fervour. Neither Roccella, nor General Vannacci, nor the ‘People of the Family’ – no one is drawing up these profiles, alongside that of the ageing new mothers.

Sometimes I feel compelled to discuss the matter with Father Alfredo.

We have fuelled a society of individualism and the cult of image, of measurement, and of indefinite youth, gradually distancing ourselves from the natural course of biological and social ageing, from the hardships of family life, and from the emotional and physical sacrifices made for the benefit of others

The woman who spent fifteen years of her life with this dandy, who has a hundred blue suits in his wardrobe, is now 42 years old; she is still beautiful and has no children, though she would have liked some. Another man – intelligent, with liquid eyes and a touch of melancholy – kept the two most important women in his life waiting for years.