Russian Families with at Least One School-Age Child Nearly Twice as Likely to be Poor than are Others, New Study Reports

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 13 – It has long been recognized that having children often drives Russian families into poverty, one of the major reasons why many married couples decide not to have any. But a new study provides details showing the impact of children at various ages on the financial standing of Russian family units.

            Conducted by Elena Tsatsura and Aleksandr Osavolyuk of the Russian Academy of Economics and Government Services on the basis of surveys in 2013 and 2022, it found that the risk of poverty varies depending on the ages of the children, with families which have school-age children suffering the greatest risk.

            The study, published in the latest issue of Demograficheskoye obozreniye (demreview.hse.ru/article/view/28499/23116), has now been discussed in detail on the To Be Precise portal (tochno.st/materials/risk-bednosti-u-semei-so-skolnikami-pocti-vdvoe-vyse-srednego-naibolsii-u-nepolnyx-semei).

            According to Tsatsura and Osavolyuk, the risk of being poor among families which have at least one child of school age is 1.8 times greater than among the average for all families. Families all of whose children are preschoolers are only 1.37 times more likely to be poor, although their per capita incomes are approximately 37 percent lower than childless pairs.

            They also found that single-parent families are twice as likely to be poor than are Russian families as a whole and that their propensity to fall into poverty is not affected at all by the age of the child or helped that much by existing government programs to help them avoid having such a fate.

            What this means is the impact of having children on family incomes is in some respects a delayed action mine and that the happiness of new parents may be dashed when they are compelled to send their children to school.