Families facing the Italian lockdown: Temporal adjustments and new caring practices in SPC arrangements

Merla, Laura [UCL] Murru, Sarah [UCL]

This paper focuses on the challenges of the Covid-19 related Spring 2020 Lockdown in Italy for separated families living in the Turin area (Piedmont) and who were practicing egalitarian or shared physical custody arrangements (SPC) for their children when this lockdown was declared. Italy was the first European country to be severely hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, with first confirmed cases of community transmission found on February 21st in the North of the country. Between February 23rd and 29th, several Northern regions, including Piedmont, suspended public events and closed schools and museums, and on March 4th all schools and universities in the country were closed. National lockdown – the first in Europe – was declared on March, 9th. When the pandemic hit Italy, we were just about to start a second wave of data collection with families SPC arrangements in the Turin area, in the context of a research project exploring the everyday experiences of multilocality of children aged 10 to 16 and living in post-separation families. At this stage we had an in-depth vision of the practices and routines that characterized these family arrangements in 2018-2019, and we wanted to deepen certain issues and see how these arrangements had changed over time. But with the lockdown, additional questions emerged: what impact did lockdown have on those family arrangements? How did these families adapt to the lockdown situation? And what do these adaptations tell us about the structural factors and inequalities that shape post-divorce family life in Italy, a country still characterized by strong gender inequalities and women’s prominent role in caring for children (Naldini & Solera 2018) ? These are the questions we address in this paper. After presenting SPC in the Italian context and highlighting the persistence of the “mother as carer model” (Naldini & Santero 2019), we will present our theoretical approach which consists in considering lockdown as a “challenge-trial” (Martuccelli 2015) that profoundly disrupted family routines, forced individuals to face it, and revealed some key elements of the social structures and inequalities that underlie and shape post-divorce family life in Italy. We will then explain how the families we met adapted their custody arrangement during lockdown, and discuss the key factors that influenced, and are revealed by, these re-organisations, from a gendered perspective.