“Overall, I would like to say that our society is tired of prohibitive rhetoric. Nothing can be banned anymore, especially people who are about to or are thinking about becoming parents or moving into the category of larger families. They have enough problems,” the server quotes Novikova.
He spoke at the conference Demographic break in Russia: Paths to success, where Russian officials talked about how to strengthen demography in Russia. She dies, among other things, because of the Russian war in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands of men died.
Novikov further emphasized that when people have a child, “everything is a problem” for their parents. “He eats, he eats too little, or he doesn’t eat at all, he doesn’t want to drink from the breast, he whines, he doesn’t sleep or he sleeps all the time. Everything is a problem. And a person is in shock at that moment. If we still prohibit something and say: ‘We will deal with you, who you brought into the world,’ it will not lead to anything good,” he said.
Therefore, according to him, only an “atmosphere creating such favorable conditions in society” can contribute to the improvement of the demographic situation, so that people are not afraid to have children and are sure that they will receive support from the state.
Novikov spoke of “restrictive rhetoric”. By this he was referring to the numerous bans in Russia, which include strong restrictions on the Internet, including the ban on Telegram or applications from the company Meta (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads). Russians also face huge mortgage rates, which currently hover around twenty percent.
In Russia, the birth rate is currently around 1.4 children per woman. Russian leader Vladimir Putin spoke about the need to increase this number to at least 2.
