Russia; Youth

A school playground - the sidewalk...

One of the things that has struck me since arriving at Belgium is that there are kids here. You wander around town, you bump into them everywhere. It's not that unusual - until I started to reflect on Russia. Sometimes you don't notice what's missing until it appears. Now that I see kids everywhere, it strikes me how few we saw on the streets in Russia.

It wasn't that we never saw children. We did.  In the parks, at the play equipment and at schools. The places that belong to kids, they were there. But it is remarkable now, on reflection, how absent they were from the parts of Moscow we visited. It made me wonder, are there no kids in Russia?  So I checked.  Not really, as it turns out.  Of the 200 countries for which statistics were reported, Russia's birth rate was 174!  Lower than the People's Republic of China with their famous "One Child" policy.  In fact, there just aren't that many kids in Russia.

A park - Old School

The statistic makes sense in the context of the anecdotal information we encountered talking to Russians during our stay. Having kids in Russia is not easy. They are expensive, it seems and many Russians worry about having the resources to care for them as they should. Will the apartment be big enough?  After they leave public school will there be the money to pay for a trade school or university?

Moscow Park - New School

Parents everywhere deal with these questions, but for Russians they are somewhat new. Under communism there were other worries, how to pay for the kids wasn't one of them. Then there was the collapse and the uncertainty.  Kids represent a commitment of decades. None of us can see into the future.  You have to guess. My sense is that for most Russians the guess has been that it does not look good enough to risk having kids.  When will we have a hint that Russia has turned the corner? Maybe watching the birth rate statistics will give you an indicator.