Having worked for many years as a consultant in an elementary school, I have experienced the perpetual conflicts that oppose the institution of school with the institution of family. The failures and difficulties of children oscillate from one side to the other of these two institutions (the major formative contexts from ages of six to ten), each time trying to identify a clear target that is the cause of difficulties, problems, and failures.
I have met hyper-protective families, incapable of throwing their children out into the world and allowing them to experiment and to be challenged. In Italy, the family plays a central role in people’s lives, often more so than in other Western countries. This leads to a deep emotional attachment between parents and children, which makes the idea of living alone less attractive.
On the social level, economic instability plays an important deciding role in young people staying in their family home. Low wages, temporary or part-time contracts, and high housing costs play a pivotal part in extending the duration within the protective bubble of the family. In Italy, if not socially encouraged, it is widely tolerated for young adults to live with their parents until the age of thirty or beyond, whereas in many other European countries, young people tend to leave their family home much earlier. This is a result, among other things, of the idea that adult life is often defined by marriage or cohabitation, rather than by simple individual independence.
This is the sociological aspect of the problem, however not the most important. In 1944 Leo Longanesi [1], interpreting a deeply profound national sentiment, wrote: “Our national flag should exhibit a large statement: I have a family”, an expression that implies an elastic attitude, if not a tendency to compromise or even set aside ethical principles, civic duty and concern for the common good.
Even today, due to the lack of significant support and incentives for young people, the family remains the main social safety net and the primary source of support in times of economic or job-related difficulties.
Another writer, Andrea Bajani, in his recent book The Anniversary [2], returns to this theme, highlighting how there is something deeply Catholic and Italian in reducing every social action and every sense of identity to the family; “From mutual aid to family-based capitalism to revenge, from the structure of criminal networks to the inability to establish a lasting form of government, that is a kind of power seen as stronger than family or blood connections”.
Bajani, however, does not take all this into the wadding of resignation, because the family that over-protects, that provides everything, that nourishes without the prospect of weaning, the family that produces “Bamboccioni” (as they have been referred to in 2007 in a hearing in Parliament by Padoa Schioppa), is on the other hand the family from which to flee.
In The Anniversary, Bajani portrays a family from which the only way to be saved is to escape. He describes an oppressive situation, that crushes and obfuscates life in a totalitarian power, where the only way to survive is to become invisible. But isn’t this the other face, the Thanatos side of the family that surrounds its children in a protection so tight that it takes away their breath, their initiative, and even the very possibility of diverging thought?
Another writer, James Ballard, understood this well in his extraordinary story Running Wild [3], published in 1988. The novel is set in a futuristic Britain, in an elite residential community. This place is portrayed as an oasis of perfection, where technology and economic well-being are supposed to guarantee an idyllic life. However, this apparent perfection presents a disturbing reality: that of an overprotective society, where children are raised in a sterile environment deprived of authentic experiences, and in order to escape from it, they erupt in violence, carrying out a massacre of the adults and then disappearing without a trace.
The family of lethargic annihilation, which poisons with love, actually has its darker side in blind violence, an eruption of Thanatos that seems inevitable to break through the bubble of artificial breathing that isolates from the world and discourages every possible initiative.
[1] Leo Longanesi, Parliamo dell’elefante. Frammenti di un diario, Longanesi, Milano, 1947.
[2] Andrea Bajani, L’anniversario, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2024.
[3] James Ballard (1988), Un gioco da bambini, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2007.
Translation: Giuseppe Covelli
Proofreading: Valentina Manucci
