Italy: Minister calls for law to force mummy’s boys and girls to leave parents’ homes at 18

Italy’s innovation minister for public administration Renato Brunetta has suggested a new law to force grown-up children to leave their parents’ home.

Renato Brunetta was speaking after a judge ordered a father to carry on paying a living allowance to his 32-year-old live-in daughter, who is continuing ot work on her thesis eight years after graduating in philosophy.

Studies suggest more than half of Italians under the age of 34 live with their parents. The average age of home-leavers in Italy is one of the highest in Europe.

Mr Brunetta has been tasked with reforming Italy’s notoriously inefficient bureaucracy. “We need this debate,” Mr Brunetta told the Independent. “In a sense I’m being provocative. However, all these young people think they’re living in a free hotel, and actually there’s a price they pay. It allows their parents to keep control of them, emotionally, socially and financially – and deny them their freedom and the chance to mature.”

He has already declared war on the fanulloni – the skivers – who abuse their safe state jobs by sloping off for long lunch breaks and the like.

Now he has turned his fire on these overgrown adult children who refuse to leave the parental home. They should be forced out at 18, he says – if needs be by law.

Mr Brunetta added: “Until I was 30, it was my mother who made my bed every morning, which I’m ashsamed of.”

His comments follow a court order forcing a 60 year old father, Giancarlo Casagrande, from Bergano, to help pay his 32-year-old daughter’s living expenses – eight years after she had finished her university studies.

Mr Brunetta’s idea has been dismissed on all sides as a step too far. But he has highlighted an increasing trend in Italy for grown children to stay at home – even into early middle age.

The Independent reported Minister without porfolio Roberto Calderoli as saying: “My friend Brunetta seems to have lost the plot. (His proposal) represents an unacceptable interference in the lives of families, single people and their decisions.” Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa said: “I was at home with my parents until I was 27, when I got married. I expect my daughter will do the same.”