The specialist refused to call the situation catastrophic
Vladimir Putin called on Russians to “revive the tradition” of giving birth to 7-8 children. Traditional families in Russia were mostly peasants, they lived in some kind of their own houses, they had some kind of their own subsidiary plot, and they fed from it — mostly poorly and poorly. Well, now the reality is completely different. We asked a specialist to assess the prospects for large Russian families.
“In Russia, large families have been growing since the late 2000s,” notes independent demographer Alexey Raksha in an interview with MK. – There is no such increase in large families as in Russia after 2006 in any country in the world. And Russia’s level of large families is approaching countries such as the UK and the USA. Because in the 90s there was an extremely low number of children. In the last years of the Soviet Union, it was also low in the RSFSR. Now the number of children in our country has already exceeded the figures of the 70-80s and continues to grow.
— No. Blame it on social contagion. When people look at some examples around them and begin to give birth. But even taking this into account, there will never be a mass birth of seventh and subsequent children in Russia. Just like in other developed countries. This is the lot of countries such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger, Iraq, and other underdeveloped, ultra-religious countries, predominantly Islamic. This will no longer happen in other countries. You can call for anything, but it won’t happen. It won't happen en masse.
“Everything is not all right with us.” But ours is completely normal, a normal average for countries with a similar level of development, for countries with a higher level of development, for countries with a culture similar to ours, we have an absolutely normal birth rate. And our number of children is even higher than in a number of European countries. There is no catastrophe.
– Our birth rate is growing. But our large number of children will never grow to a level of 7-8 children per family. We can look at the level of large families in the United States and identify a certain goal to which Russian large families can grow. You still have to grow up to America.
Let's look at the numbers from Anatoly Vishnevsky's demography reference book. Before the October Revolution, the proportion of women born before 1874 who gave birth at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and who had more than 7 children was 61%. Born in 1907 – 11%. Among citizens born in 1965, the share of those who give birth to more than 7 children was 0.27%.
Let's look at the current statistics. By the way, we didn’t have such statistics until 2022. Only last year did Rosstat deign to publish statistics on children after the fifth birth order. Our share of large families increased after the introduction of maternity capital by Putin in 2007. Just today I received data for the third quarter of 2023. The share of those giving birth to seven children has grown quite well, amounting to 0.54%. An obvious doubling.
Now we look at America, the leader in the number of children in the United States — 1.23% of American women gave birth to more than 7 children this year. To reach US levels, we need to grow 2.5 times. Moreover, in that golden age that our president is talking about, there were 61% of such women. However, less than half of these children survived — about 40%.