Family and Parenting Values of the Youth: Stability in Shifting Russia

In consequence of long-term depopulation tendency in Russia the issues of the importance of a family, quality of a parenting are actual. Their research  assumes the analysis of valuable orientations concerning family and parenting. Studying of youth values is especially important because it is somehow possible to influence views of young people.

The article presents the results of qualitative research of young people’s opinion about family and parenting. We used  biographical research method and analyzed 147 essays of Russian students at the age of 17-21 years. This survey was conducted in Russian cities in Ural region in 2013. The childhood and adolescence of respondents matched the difficult period of social and economic reformation.

The analysis of the papers revealed three categories of the respondents who had given different descriptions of a parental family: "gratitude-description", "neutrality-description" and "problem-description". There is a close interrelation between the inherited social experience of the relations in a parental family and image of their own future family. At the description of a parenting there are such words as "pleasure", "happiness", "care", "responsibility", "work".

       Results demonstrated the high value of a family in Russia today. Describing the desirable relations in the future family students emphasize stability and  indisputable monogamy of its members. They deny divorce. The marriage unions of grandparents are often accepted as a model of marriage relations and positive experience.

Our results inspire a certain optimism about the demographic prospects of Russia. They show that the modern Russian youth who were born at the breaking point of Russian history successfully admitted traditional family values and behavior models. It creates conditions for carrying out the demographic policy oriented not only on growth of population, but also on improvement of quality of the human capital.