Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They
have to take you in, wrote Robert Frost. Like so much
else from the pen of that flinty New Englander, this is a
quintessentially American idea, as several years abroad have taught
me. To people in other parts of the world, home is the place where,
till you choose to leave it, they will not kick you out.
Italy’s highest appeals court recently ruled that a father must
keep paying
child support to his 29-year-old son, even though the younger
man has a law degree and a $200,000 trust fund, and has turned down
several job offers. According to the judges, the son has the right
to parental support until he finds work appropriate to “his
specific qualifications, his attitudes and his real interests.”
No wonder Italy has the lowest fertility rate in recorded
history. At these prices, 1.18 children is all anyone here can
afford.
The right-to-loaf angle was what made the decision newsworthy in
the States, but many American readers must also have marveled at
the fact of a grown son still living with his divorced mother.
In Italy, though, that detail is barely worth mentioning. An
estimated 70 percent of 29-year-old men live with their parents,
according to the national statistics agency (as reported last week
in Italy Daily). The proportion of stay-at-home women is much
lower, presumably because they marry earlier.
I don’t know the numbers for other European countries, but my
experience in Spain suggests that the practice is at least as
common there. During the year I lived in Madrid, I was repeatedly
struck by the size and elegance of the apartments inhabited by
people in my early-thirties age bracket — until I remembered that
the apartments belonged to their mothers and fathers. Several of my
Spanish friends, though gainfully employed, thought nothing of
sharing a bedroom with at least one sibling.
Whenever I asked about this custom, stay-at-home Spaniards
always told me that they would have liked to move out, but that
they couldn’t afford it. Italians in that situation now give me the
same answer. And it’s true that salaries in both countries are
generally lower than in the States, whereas rents are not. But
obviously this isn’t a question of strict economic necessity.
The typical American fresh out of college is glad to spend half
his salary for a room in a crammed group house furnished with a few
sticks of Ikea. He’d sooner sit in a cage at Guantanamo prison than
move back into the old bedroom, with its decor of toy-soldier
wallpaper and high school trophies, and the ever-hovering presence
of mom and dad.
Whereas his southern European contemporary will normally choose
to save his money for Armani suits and Ferragamo shoes (or more
affordable knock-offs), and put up with the inevitable surveillance
of the older generation. Really, he doesn’t even notice it. There’s
no word for “privacy” in Italian or Spanish. And Mama does all the
cooking and laundry for you.
Americans sometimes make a fetish of independence. A few years
back, the New Yorker magazine ran an entire article based
on the fact that most of the suspects in an especially gruesome
case of police brutality were grown men living with their mothers.
But other countries recognize that not everyone who chooses to
share a roof with parents is Norman Bates.
On balance, however, the American practice strikes me as
healthier. Tradition and respect for family are beautiful things,
often shamefully neglected in the States (though Europe is catching
up). But as the case of the 29-year-old lawyer suggests, if the
pleasures of modern consumerism are not joined to the demands of
even moderately rugged individualism, the result is not merely
decadent but ridiculous.
