(ANSA) - ROME, MAY 07 - The year of the pandemic was difficult for Italian mothers, about 6 million, who had to extricate themselves from work and small children left at home because they could not count on the support of nursery schools and kindergartens. Overall in 2020 249 thousand women lost their jobs and 96 thousand were mothers, of which 4 out of 5 have children under 5 years old. They are those madriche because of the need to follow the little ones, they have had to give up their work or have been expelled from it. Almost all - 90,000 out of 96,000 - were already employed part-time before the pandemic. Mothers even more in difficulty in the South, with Campania and Calabria in the last places, while the situation was better in the north, where at the top, as has been the case since 2012, there are once again the Autonomous Provinces of Bolzano and Trento,followed this year by the Aosta Valley, which "surpasses" Emilia-Romagna. The positive aspect is that in all the Regions there is a general improvement, due to a greater propensity for an equal distribution of family care and workloads within couples, even if it is not yet sufficient to reduce the existing imbalances.
This is what emerges from the sixth report "The Equilibrists: lamaternity in Italy 2021" that Save The Children launches on the eve of Mother's Day to analyze the condition of mothers in Italy during the pandemic.
It is no coincidence, Save The Children points out, if our country holds the record for the oldest mothers in Europe at the birth of their first child (31.3 years against an average of 29.4 inEU mothers), not to mention the rate of birth rate which during the pandemic recorded a decrease of 3.8%, equal to 16 fewer milan births, compared to the previous year.
Given the "gloomy" picture, Save The Children calls for urgent policies for children, in particular it asks the policy to "immediately implement measures capable of creating an integrated system from zero to six years, which offers a free quality service in which children have the opportunity to learn and live educational contexts necessary for their development ".
(HANDLE).