How Anxiety and Anger Shape Italian Satisfaction With Life—Grazie... Immagino., Mom and Dad

By the time you’re 22, your frontal lobe is just barely open for business, your student debt has metastasized into a personality trait, and you’re beginning to suspect that your so-called adult life might be an elaborate payback plan for how your parents raised you.

Welcome to Italy, land of espresso, existential dread, and—if recent research is to be believed—overprotective parenting that can quietly fry your nervous system.

A recent study by Italian researchers Martina Smorti and colleagues (2024), published in the Journal of Psychology, took a magnifying glass to the Italian family dynamic and discovered something unnervingly elegant: the way your parents bonded with you—whether they coddled you like a houseplant or cared for you like a sentient being—echoes forward into your adult life through the neurotic relay race of anxiety and anger.