A New Youth?: Young People, Generations And ... - Youth Nation

266A New Youth?Lone mothers may however receive preferential treatment under more generalprovisions, such as nursery and child-care places. Lone mothers may also benefitfrom family and maternity allowances, from partial or total exemption frommedical care costs and, until recently, from the Reddito Minimo di Inserimento(Minimum Income Support) 11 – introduced experimentally in 1998 and abolishedin 2003 by the current Government. Family allowances treat single parents slightlymore generously than married mothers, but only if they are workers or pensioners.In the case of lone mothers, the inadequacy of the economic support available inItaly to families with children may also be seen in the case of lone mothers. First ofall, in order to receive family allowance, a lone mother must have total custody ofher children 12 and must be an employee. Secondly, although the mechanism of theallowances takes the higher expenses of this type of family into account, becauseof the interaction between the equivalence scale adopted and the definition ofincome thresholds, in actual fact the income benefits provided by the allowancedecreases with the increase in number of children (Toso, 1997). As for tax benefits,only unmarried women and widows are considered lone parents and thereforefavoured.Thus, the destiny of lone mothers in the Italian welfare model seems to beintegration without recognition (Bimbi, 2000).Lastly, as far as training opportunities are concerned, a survey of theeducational and training policies reserved for young lone mothers in Italy – whichmade use of a retrieval mainly made up of structured questions sent to civilservants in charge of professional training in the 20 Italian regions – revealed thatthere were almost no policies specifically designed to help train lone mothers ofany age. The justification (emerging during telephone interview follow-ups withvarious Regional directors/managers) for this lack seems to be that they are, inactual fact, an almost invisible category, and this is holding up/stopping theimplementation of such policies for intervention (Trivellato, 2002).The most important factor in assessing the level of adequacy of institutionalresponses to social and family change may have something to do with theprocesses of social construction of dependence. Welfare states in industrializedcountries have constructed what has been described as the ‘Fordist course of life’(Esping-Andersen, 1995), characterized by a particularly protective system formale adults (who formed the majority of heads of families). In other words,welfare was modelled on the life cycle of the mass industrial worker, whichexpected men to enter the work world at a young age and their subsequentpermanence in their wage-earning area with poor prospects of changing theircareer (followed by compulsory pensioning); for women, a short period of gainfulemployment, frequently interrupted by marriage or pregnancy, followed by aremaining period devoted to the care of children, invalids, and the elderly (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Female dependence on their male partners was therefore used asa strategy to enable high levels of productivity in the Industrial era: domestic workassumed personalizing contents no longer aimed at surviving but at socializing andregenerating high productivity working potential (Mingione, 1997, 2001). In a‘familist’ context such as Italy, in particular, women’s dependence on male incomewas traditionally considered as a sort of protection from poverty. This produced