emancipation, not just social emancipation, in terms of taking jobs and
having professions, but in their relations between men and women in the family.
Men, when it happened so fast and so abrupt, and when it is backed
by the social insecurity, which is not very high in Russia.
This feeling of insecurity creates macho attitudes towards life,
towards females, toward families, and towards gay culture.
So that's probably one of the explanations we may have that lets
us understand why such a high percentage of Russian population is so much anti gay.
Also because, and I will talk about it in a moment about
the role of traditional religious institutions whose
role is raising is very important now in today's Russia.
Two other issues, so that was about the structure of the family.
Two other issues that needs to be covered because they're so
culturally specific will be raising children and
role of education in both in the family and for the society.
I watched recently an interesting movie, it was actually on YouTube I think,
about the babies, the first year of life of babies in different cultures.
There were no words, no text in this movie.
It was just showed how babies were treated by their caregivers, mothers, or fathers.
Basically mothers I think during their first year.
How mothers would communicate with their babies in different cultures.
And with you know all babies of course were absolutely adorable and
it's something that makes us all human, raising children.
But the ways, the patterns of communication, were very different.
So of course this is a culturally specific issues.
And while I won't talk much about babies, but
generally about raising children, if you were to mention here is that,
and again, Russian culture doesn't have a very similar one and
the same pattern of how to dress, to discipline, to treat young children.
With the role of education, of course, also dealing with children.
This is a separate issue.
But one thing to mention is of course that Russians love their children.
If you want to make connections with people,
if you want to sort of build relationships and gain trust,
of course, discussing the children is a very good point.
If you deal with people who may have children.
With young people probably it won't be so interesting for them, say,
to discuss their younger siblings.
But talking about people who have families.
The children are a 100% good issue to start conversation and
building relationship with.
But when you look at how people discipline their children in various cultures,
you can say that Russians are rather chaotic in this.
So there isn't such a strict prohibition for instance,
not slapping your kid if really he or she behaves really bad.
I know how much protest that it will create among my
students who come from Western European countries.
They say that it's still their sort of attitude of a totalitarian state
when you treat child with all kind of prohibitions and you can even slap them.
Well, I prefer to leave evaluations and
discussions of how you assess that for instance, for forums.
My idea is to say that there isn't one in the same paradigm.
Russia is a very diverse country and for instance, the Muslim regions of the north
caucuses will take disciplining children in one way, in a more traditional way.
In places where people live according to certain other traditions,
again, these traditions will be quite visible in the way of disciplining and
the very idea that children have to be disciplined.
But when you deal with more global cultural patterns or scenarios,
we, all Russians, especially Russians with higher education level,
are very much involved in the discussion of how
to get your child better opportunities in life.
Which means education, of course, and
also developing extracurricular activities in school and so on and so forth.
Russian communication is rather emotional as viewed from the Western perspective.
We discussed it.
So in this way, communication between, say, mother and her baby can seem,
and actually often is, very emotional too.
And this emotional can mean both nice and bad.
Which is really characteristic of
behavior that you can see in the street among the general population.
You will see that mothers do say a lot of
criticism if their children are not behaving.
This is not like in other cultures, where children are not criticized,
are not restricted, are not in a way, punished in any way,
as in Japanese culture for instance.
This creates a lot of affectionate discourse when we
discuss how it looks from the point of view of an outsider.
A lot of attention is being given to raising children in the families
where can they afford it.
On a social level, it involves The issue of day care, for instance,
to allow parents to work because the Soviet Union was a social state and
Russian now positions itself as a social state again with all the,
there is a lot of discussion in the public and in the government about
providing more day care facilities because of some of them were abandoned in the 90s,
and creating conditions for both parents to be able to work.
In terms of, we're talking about interpersonal issues now.
So, I will just mention that the legislation in Russia for
mothers to give birth, maternity leaves, and money paid for
raising children, this legislation is very progressive and
very socially targeted because Russia's also interested
in having more children, our demography's pretty bad.
The amount of money being paid probably will not seem too big for
some developed countries, but
the ratio of what this money means as compared to other salaries and
also, the amount of time given to parents for maternity.
And now, even paternity leave is pretty long.
For instance, mothers can stay out of their jobs for
three years partly paid, then not paid but their job is kept for them.