Italy: Crib makers in crisis as births continue to fall

Rome: In northern Italy’s once thriving industrial district for baby and child products there are now only two manufacturers that remain.

It follows years of falling birth rates and competition from abroad, the combination of which has forced many of the small-scale family-owned businesses to close, said.

Bergamo province was home to around a dozen factories in the 1970s and 1980s, producing high chairs, cribs – these are generally smaller and more portable than cots – toys and prams, until the market collapsed as the number of births in Italy shrank by more than a third over the last 20 years.

One of those to remain, manufacturer Foppapedretti, sprang up – like many of its former Bergamo peers – during Italy’s post-war economic and baby boom. Founder Ezio Foppa Pedretti began making wooden toys in 1945 out of the offcuts from his uncle’s umbrella handle factory.

“We started out as a toy manufacturer, then focused on nursery products, but we soon realised that a major demographic decline was looming,” said Chairman Luciano Bonetti, adding that they used their experience with wood to expand into household, furniture and gardening items from the 1980s.

Around 1990, his company typically sold around 100,000 highchairs and 80,000 baby beds a year. “Today if we sell 30,000 baby beds it is a golden year”, Bonetti said.

Births in Italy, the EU’s third most populous country, hit a record low around 370,000 in 2024. The fertility rate has slumped to 1.18, below the EU average of 1.38 in 2023, and far below the 2.1 needed for a steady population. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has made encouraging more women to give birth a priority.

“We are facing a birth crisis, which in Italy has progressively eroded more than 35-40 per cent of the market [for children’s products],” trade unionist Adriana Geppert said. Competition from low-cost producers in China was another major challenge for businesses in Italy and when selling abroad.

The news wire highlights how two years ago, a group of manufacturers for child and baby products went as far as producing a short fictional documentary, positing a potential dystopian scenario in which by 2050 only one baby would be born in Italy, as a way of highlighting the urgent demographic challenges facing the country.

Alessandro Rosina, a professor of demography and social statistics at the Catholic University of Milan who featured in the documentary, says Italy’s situation is particularly alarming.

“The film aims to get people to think about the present situation and look ahead to 2050 with the warning: ‘Be careful – the choices that we make or don’t make now have consequences on our future,’” Rosina said.

Italy’s theoretical scenario of zero births by 2050 isn’t entirely implausible, and assumes that the 2014-2023 trend of consolidated annual birth numbers continues decreasing with a linear regression until zero is reached in 2050.

Italy’s population is not only shrinking, it is also aging. The country has the highest median age in the EU at 48.7 years old. As a result, where baby nappies were once heavily advertised on TV, now adverts for incontinence diapers for adults are becoming more common.

Consumer goods company Fater, an Italian joint venture between local pharma group Angelini and US giant Procter & Gamble, said in its latest annual report that “absorbent products” for adults had grown steadily in recent years, becoming a major pillar of growth in Italy.

Back in his shop, Bonetti said he was considering branching out further into products for senior citizens, such as reclining armchairs, despite the market being crowded, since it is a fast-growing sector in an increasingly aging Europe.

“There might still be room for us – after all, these would be the same customers who bought our children’s and household items over their lifetimes and who know the quality of our products,” he said.

The issue is far from limited to Italy, with increasing concerns across the West about declining births and aging populations.

It is feared that what has been called the “baby bust” is going to cause further societal problems such as unfunded pensions, health care pressures and all sorts of other economic woes.

But the real problem with having fewer children, notes Laura Perrins in a previous Catholic Herald article, is that there will simply be fewer children.

“Not only that, but today’s children are the parents of the future. Without children today, there are no families tomorrow,” she writes.