Staunton,
November 18 – Seventy-five percent of married couples in Russia have children,
but only 55 percent say they would like to have them, according to a 17-year-long
study by Yuliyz Lezhnina of the Institute for Social Policy of Moscow’s Higher
School of Economics (rosbalt.ru/moscow/2018/11/17/1746996.html)
Having children is still the basis
for marriage in 20 percent of all cases, she says, but as many as 55 percent
say they would like to have children, 10 percent one, 30 percent two, and 15
percent three or more. But in reality,
75 percent of married pairs have children, 34 percent one, another third two,
and seven percent three or more.
That means, Lezhnina says, that “in
many families there are more children than they would like or that they simply
have become parents without in general planning to do so. One way or the other,
each fifth resident of the country is raising children which he or she didn’t
want. In rural areas, this phenomenon is encountered more often than in cities.”
She adds that the childfree movement
and single sex marriages are becoming more common but not so much that one could
as of now speak of any trend in that direction. But the change does mean that
there is less support for boosting family size as a means of solving Russia’s
demographic problems.
These findings are not the only
piece of bad demographic news to surface in the last few days. Kommersant reports on the basis of the same
study that as a result of educational gains among women relative to men over
the last 20 years, the share of women who marry men with less education than
they have is rising (kommersant.ru/doc/3799855).
In 1995, 31.3
percent of women married men who were less educated than they; by 2015, that
figure had risen to 37.1 percent. Because that pattern means that women can
earn more outside the home, that will further depress the number willing to
stay at home and have children, thus further compromising the Kremlin’s plans
for a boost in the birthrate anytime soon.
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