Almost Half of Muslims in Russan Federation At Present want to Have Three or More Children, More than Double the Share of Ethnic Russians who Do

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Fertility rates have been falling among Muslim nationalities in the Russian Federation just as they have been among traditionally Orthodox Christian ones, but it is still the case, experts say, that nearly half of all Muslins in that country want their families to have three or more children, more than double the share of ethnic Russians. 

            While that does not mean that all the Muslims who do will achieve that goal, it strongly suggests that the Muslim nations of the Russian Federation will have more large families and thus form an ever larger share of the population of that country in the future, especially given the demographic decline of the ethnic Russians.

            That is just one of the findings reported by the Russian Orthodox Church’s Mercy portal in an article explicitly intended to dispel many of the myths about large families that now circulate in that country (miloserdie.ru/article/mnogodetnye-v-rossii-ih-pochti-3-milliona-semej-no-o-nih-vse-eshhe-ochen-malo-znayut/).

            Among the most noteworthy of the portal’s findings are the following:

·       There are now more large families now than there were only a few years ago, 2.9 million as against 1.1 million in 2013, because families with two or more children have been giving birth to 30 percent of all children, while those with fewer or none have been giving birth to smaller shares.

·       Data on families with children are unreliable because until last year the regions were allowed to set the rules for which families were counted as being large. In Kamchatka, only families with five children were counted as large; in the Far North, those with just two; and other regions set different ages to which the families had to raise their children in order to be counted.

·       Russian families have three or more children for a variety of reasons, ranging from desires and plans to accidental pregnancies that lead to an increase in the number of children.

·       Every third Russian family with three or more children is poor, and, according to the portal, “the more children, the higher the risk that the family will be in that income group.

·       A small but growing group of families with three or more children is to be found among richer parents.

·       Psychological studies have found that people in families without any children or who have three or more feel better about themselves than do families with one or two offspring.