Giulia Maria Dotti Sani

Objective: This article examines the prevalence and correlates of parental guilt and shame in Italy, including anticipated parental guilt among childless individuals. Background: Parental guilt and shame arise when parents perceive a mismatch between internalized norms of good parenting and their actual parenting practices. While these emotions have been documented in other societies, empirical evidence in Italy remains limited, largely qualitative, and focused on mothers. This study addresses this gap by providing national-level evidence on both mothers and fathers and by extending the analysis to anticipated parental guilt. Method: The study draws on an original online survey of 6,000 adults of childbearing age living in Italy, with a sampling design that deliberately oversampled mothers (3,500 mothers, 1,000 childless women, 1,000 fathers, and 500 childless men), with a final analytical sample of 5,587. The survey includes items measuring different forms of parental guilt and shame, as well as anticipated guilt. Exploratory Factor Analysis was used to construct five guilt scales, which were subsequently analyzed using OLS regression models. Results: Parental guilt and shame are similarly prevalent among Italian mothers and fathers, with mothers displaying a modestly higher level of these emotions. No gender differences emerge in anticipated parental guilt. However, the correlates of guilt vary by gender, with economic well-being and gender-role attitudes emerging as the strongest and most consistent correlates across nearly all forms of guilt. Conclusion: Parental guilt emerges as a salient emotional dimension in Italy not only among mothers and fathers but also among childless individuals, suggesting that moral expectations surrounding parenthood are widely shared in a low-fertility context.

This narrative review integrates quantitative and qualitative research to provide a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of maternal guilt, examining its measurement, types, triggers, and prevalence. Maternal guilt is a widespread emotion that is associated with the societal role of women as caregivers, yet this association is sometimes lost when talking more broadly about parental guilt. Critical gaps persist in the understanding and measurement of maternal guilt, particularly in the areas of cross-cultural variation, intersectional perspectives, and the long-term consequences for both mothers and their children. The classification of maternal guilt into types highlights that maternal guilt can take different forms, depending on specific root causes and circumstances. By analysing triggers, this review also shows that maternal guilt is enhanced through individual, situational, and institutional factors, and it varies across countries, being influenced by societal and cultural characteristics.

The normative framework that defines ideal motherhood, prescribing what it means to be a “good mother” in a given cultural and historical context, significantly influences women’s career aspirations, family choices, and fertility decisions. Yet, there is limited understanding of what women themselves consider to be “ideal motherhood”, particularly given that such ideals may reflect both genuine preferences and adaptations to structural constraints. Gaining insight into both personal and perceived societal ideals is crucial for evaluating the extent to which women’s views of motherhood align with, or diverge from, prevailing social expectations. This study builds on hegemonic and non-hegemonic models of motherhood differing in the degree of maternal involvement, the role of maternal employment, and the division of childcare responsibilities. We conduct a large-scale conjoint experiment embedded in an online survey administered in autumn 2024, involving approximately 4,500 Italian women aged 20 to 50, to evaluate the relative importance of various attributes associated with different models of motherhood. The findings show that women tend to favor elements of counter-hegemonic motherhood models over hegemonic ones, both in their personal ideals and in their perceptions of societal expectations. In particular, maternal employment (whether full- or part-time) and the sharing of childcare responsibilities with fathers emerge as central components of the ideal mother. These results challenge conventional assumptions about women’s endorsement of the dominant notion of mothering, offering new insight into shifting motherhood ideals in contemporary Italy.

Over the past decades, opposite-sex couples have moved away from the traditional ‘male breadwinner model’ towards a more egalitarian division of paid work. However, lockdown measures and the closures of schools and childcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic may have challenged egalitarian divisions of paid work, pushing couples into traditional breadwinning arrangements. This study investigates whether opposite-sex couples experienced short- and medium-term relapses into traditional breadwinning arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic. Logistic regressions models, applied to harmonized data from four country-specific representative longitudinal studies fielded during the pandemic (Varhaiskasvatus (Finland), pairfam (Germany), LISS (the Netherlands), and the UKHLS (the UK)), are used to estimate the probability of shifting into traditional breadwinning arrangements among opposite-sex co-resident partners from different social strata. Results indicate a moderate re-traditionalization of breadwinning arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic that did not appear to deepen pre-existing social inequalities in couples’ division of paid work.

During the first stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, many couples experienced major shifts in their division of housework. Previous research suggests these have been consequential for well-being, but less is known about changes in later stages of the pandemic and their consequences for psychological distress, including gender-specific patterns therein. This article addresses three research questions: (1) How are changes in couples’ division of housework related to psychological distress at a later stage of the pandemic? (2) Are there differences between short- and longer-term changes in housework? (3) Are there gender-specific patterns? We harmonize longitudinal data from Finland, Germany, and the UK, for which information on three stages of the COVID-19 pandemic is available (pre-pandemic, during-lockdown, post-lockdown). Multivariate results show that both increase and decrease in the relative share in housework are associated with higher levels of distress at a later stage of the pandemic (winter 2020/2021). Finnish women report higher levels of distress if their relative share decreased in the longer term, whereas men in the UK report higher levels of distress upon longer-term increases. No statistically significant associations were found for Germany. We furthermore found no evidence for longer-term increase in psychological distress upon short-term changes in housework.