The Expert Institute for Social Research held a round table “Year of the Family: What awaits Russian families?”

On Wednesday, the Expert Institute for Social Research (one of the main analytical centers of the presidential administration) held a round table “Year of the Family: What awaits Russian families?” Its participants supported the president in assessing Russia as a large “family of families” and reflected on the state of small families. The latter, according to experts, are often formed later than in the USSR, and with an insufficient number of children, which is not very good from the point of view of increasing the number of Russians. The traditional family, according to the discussion participants, is being attacked by the West, and in order to help it, it is necessary to correct the attitudes of young people, doing this in different ways – both with benefits and instilling romance in Russians from childhood.

This time, the participants of the EISI round table were faced with a fairly simple task: to interpret Vladimir Putin’s last words and actions related to family issues. As Kommersant predicted, the topic of family (and Russia as a “family of families”) has become one of the main ideological lines of Mr. Putin’s presidential campaign and is regularly raised as part of his work events. 2024 was declared the Year of the Family in the fall of 2023. In addition, the presidential administration initiated the “It’s Our Family” competition, the winners of which will receive 5 million rubles. to improve living conditions. Finally, on the eve of the round table, Vladimir Putin took part in the all-Russian forum “Family and Loved Ones,” where he stated that “family values ​​consolidate society,” and “Russia is truly a huge family, one might say, a family of families.” On the same day, January 23, his decree was promulgated, securing the status of a large family and providing it with various benefits.

The first deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Family Protection, Issues of Paternity, Maternity and Childhood, Tatyana Butskaya, spoke at the round table. She immediately stated that she completely agrees with the president that Russia is a “country of families,” and explained what “family” means from the point of view of public policy: “The main purpose of the family is the birth of children. But if you look from the point of view of the country, this is not just procreation, this is an increase in the number of people who live in our country, an increase in the number of Russians, this is the future of our country.” Next, the deputy focused on the details of the mentioned decree, which outlines “all the priorities” of family policy: discounts on housing and communal services, education for parents, child support, free medicines for children under six years old, free transportation for schoolchildren to and from school, free meals. Finally, Mrs. Butskaya called on Russians to strive to ensure that every second family has three children, because only then will the goal of a “large Russia” be achieved. “Look at your neighbors to your left and right and ask how many children you have. And we will understand how much work we have to do,” the deputy concluded.

VTsIOM representative Mikhail Mamonov, using sociological data, convinced those gathered that a “Russia with many children” is exactly what Russians want. Thus, “a strong family” is the leader among the most important values ​​for citizens – 67% of respondents chose it as such (in second place is “pride in the country” with 37%). 82% of respondents agree that no matter how the world changes, the traditional family will always be modern. True, the answer option “family in its traditional sense is a relic of the past” was also chosen by many respondents – 15%. But other figures more than compensated for this shortcoming. “90% of Russians declare that there should be children in the family. At the same time, almost 50% believe that ideally a family should have many children,” noted Mr. Mamonov.

The governor of the Kirov region, Alexander Sokolov, presented a view of the problem from the provinces. He began by saying that we need to take care not only of large families: “We need to support the very fact of creating a family. As behavior, as a social program of the new generation.” Nowadays people start families much later than before, Mr. Sokolov admitted, not without sadness: “I was born in 1970, in our time a person who by the age of 23-24 had not started a family, had not married, was not married was looked at somewhat strangely. And now starting a family is postponed until people are over 30!” To change the situation, it is necessary to support earlier decisions about childbearing, the governor is sure. According to him, he strives to do this in his region.

Not without the traditional reminder that families in Russia must also be protected from attacks by the West. This idea was explained in detail by the moderator, political scientist Vladimir Shapovalov: “These seemingly unshakable values ​​(of the traditional family.— “Kommersant”), we can call them Christian, Buddhist, and Islamic… They are subject to aggressive attack from our opponents, the collective West, which imposes its values, demanding to call them universal, universal. And these are the values ​​of family destruction, militant individualism, selfishness, consumerism.”

Deputy Chairman of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation Commission on Education and Education Natalya Agre discussed how to motivate young people to start a family early. In her opinion, the problem is that modern youth are not romantic enough, which means that adults and the state need to correct this and instill romance: “We must create not only support opportunities, but also romantic conditions so that children start going on dates, so that they can come back.” culture of courtship, to come back, I don’t know, dancing… We need to create romance for children!”

EISI expert Oksana Aleksandrova could only praise the various social projects being implemented in Russia to maintain family values, and, as a psychologist, criticize the process of “separation” of young people from their parents. According to her, for some reason most people perceive this not as achieving independence in decision-making, but as alienation from the family. And this leads to another important problem – belittling the role of grandparents, Ms. Alexandrova complained.

Andrey Vinokurov