Parenting & Family Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

The line is doing two jobs at once: sounding benevolent while quietly drawing a boundary around whose lives count as socially productive. Buttiglione frames the "traditional family" not as one option among many, but as infrastructure - the kind you fund because it pays dividends. Kids become the policy alibi. If children are the "greatest investment", then the family structure most closely associated with producing and raising them gets recast as a public utility, and anything outside it can be treated as, at best, private preference.

That economic metaphor is the tell. Calling parenthood an "investment" borrows the moral authority of growth, stability, and national interest. It shifts the debate from rights to returns. Once the conversation is about what benefits "everyone", objections start to look selfish: who could oppose an investment with universal payoff? The move is rhetorically clean because it avoids overt condemnation of non-traditional households while still implying they are less efficient at producing the kind of citizens a country wants.

Context matters here. Buttiglione is a Catholic-influenced European politician whose public profile has included controversy over sexuality, family policy, and the moral vocabulary of the state. Read in that light, the sentence isn't a soft-focus ode to parenting; it's an argument for privileging a specific moral order through policy - tax codes, education norms, adoption rules - without saying "because God says so". It's politics translated into demographics, where "traditional" becomes a proxy for legitimacy and the future becomes the leverage point.