Italy vs. Sweden: One Nation Is Vanishing, the Other Gave Grandparents Paid Leave to Help Out

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇸🇪 Sweden

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Italy recorded just 355,000 births in 2025, a fertility rate of 1.14 children per woman — a new all-time low in a country that is already the oldest in Europe. Sweden, meanwhile, has spent three decades methodically re-engineering fatherhood itself: 480 days of shared paid parental leave per child, 90 days reserved specifically for each parent, and, as of a recent reform, paid leave extended even to grandparents who step in to help. One country is quietly disappearing under the weight of the decision to have children; the other treats that decision as a policy problem it has been actively solving since 1995.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇸🇪 Sweden

Italy

Italy's demographic numbers have moved from concerning to genuinely historic: 2025's fertility rate of 1.14 children per woman is a new national low, births have fallen to 355,000, and the country now carries an age-dependency ratio of 57.4% — meaning an ever-shrinking working-age population is supporting an ever-larger older one. The policy response has been real but incremental rather than transformative: the second month of parental leave now pays 80% of salary and remains available until a child turns six, layered onto five months of compulsory maternity leave. What the numbers make clear is that policy alone hasn't been the binding constraint — nearly half of Italian women surveyed (49.9%) fear real career damage from having children, more than double the rate among men, and over 60% of Italians of childbearing age say they've decided against having more children specifically because of economic and social difficulty, not policy design.

The knock-on effect is structural: more than 3 million Italian women are economically inactive specifically for family reasons, against just 151,000 men — a gap that reflects both weak institutional childcare support and a cultural default that still routes caregiving disproportionately toward women, even as fertility itself collapses.

Sweden

Sweden has treated fatherhood as an engineering problem for thirty years, with results that are genuinely, if imperfectly, visible. Parents share 480 days of paid leave per child, with 90 days reserved exclusively for each parent — "use it or lose it" quotas first introduced in 1995 and expanded with an additional reserved month in 2016. Fathers today take roughly 30% of total parental leave days, averaging 73 days by a child's second birthday, up substantially from historical norms, though 18% of fathers with children in 2017 still took no leave at all. Sweden's cultural profile helps explain the design logic: Hofstede Insights scores the country at just 5 on Masculinity, the lowest score measured anywhere in the world, reflecting a consensus-driven culture that prizes caregiving and work-life balance as default values rather than individual accommodations.

The policy keeps expanding rather than plateauing — Sweden recently became the first country to extend paid leave to grandparents stepping in to help with childcare, a genuinely novel move signaling that the state sees family support as a distributed, multigenerational responsibility rather than a two-parent problem alone.

The Reckoning

Italy and Sweden represent two different theories of what causes low fertility and what fixes it. Italy's approach has largely assumed that economic support (leave pay, some job protection) would be sufficient, but the data suggests the real constraint is broader: career risk, weak institutional childcare, and a cultural default that still assigns most caregiving to women. Sweden started from the opposite assumption — that unless fathers were structurally required to take leave, the caregiving imbalance would never shift — and built quotas specifically to force behavioural change rather than merely enabling it.

The uncomfortable footnote for Sweden is that even thirty years of aggressive policy hasn't produced full equality: uptake still skews toward the already-advantaged (educated, urban, native-born), a reminder that policy design can move the average without closing every gap.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — In a discussion of parental leave policies across tech companies, several commenters singled out Spotify's global six-month paid leave, explicitly modeled on its Swedish origins, noting the unusual detail that returning parents get a full month of reduced, flexible hours specifically to ease back into the job rather than being expected to return at full capacity on day one.

Quora — Responding to a question about Italian maternity leave length, someone laid out the practical reality plainly: five months at roughly 80% pay, split two months before the due date and three after, with the remaining 20% typically absorbed by the employer — details that surprise many newcomers who assume "compulsory" leave means fully funded by the state alone.

Academic/forum research (cited via Eurofound and Cambridge University Press studies on Swedish fathers) — Despite generous formal entitlements, researchers documented Swedish fathers describing real loss of control and powerlessness during extended leave, driven by the gap between expectation and the turbulence of new parenthood — a reminder that generous policy doesn't automatically translate into an easy experience.

Quora — In a broader discussion on whether societal pressure pushes women to choose between motherhood and career, one respondent argued the deeper issue isn't leave policy at all but what happens on return — subtle reassignment away from high-visibility projects — a dynamic several commenters said applied as much in nominally generous systems as in weaker ones.

Conclusion

If you're planning a family while working in Italy, go in with clear eyes about the gap between statutory leave and lived career risk, and ask pointed questions about how your specific employer has actually handled recent parental returns. If you're planning a family in Sweden, expect the system to actively push both parents toward genuine shared leave, but don't assume the process will feel effortless just because it's well-funded. The honest version for a friend: Italy will give you time off and hope your career survives it; Sweden will insist you take the time off and try to engineer your career surviving it too — neither one has fully solved the problem, they've just picked different parts of it to work on first.