MOSCOW, December 5 (RIA Novosti) - The majority of Russian families prefer to have one child, a member of the Russian parliament said Monday.
"Russia's married couples have now established the tradition of having one child," said Yekaterina Lakhova, the head of the women, family and children committee in the lower house of parliament.
Addressing parliamentary hearings marking 10 years since the Family Code was adopted in Russia, Lakhova said single-child households made up 67% of Russian families, or 14 million families.
"The motivation to have children is very low among people [in Russia]," Lakhova said, adding that family prestige in the country had plummeted.
She also said that the number of men and women who have never been married had soared in the past decade. Ten percent of couples refuse to legalize their relationship, Lakhova said.
"Every year, about 400,000 children are born in common law unions, which accounts for 30% of the annual birth rate," Lakhova said.
In October, the State Statistics Committee reported signs of recovering birth growth in Russia, citing an increase in birth rate from 8.3 births per 1,000 people in 1999 to 10.6 births in 2004.
However, Lakhova said the resumed growth in birth rates seen in the past few years was still far from a well-established trend. "In the past ten years, the total number of children shrank by nearly eight million."
She added that the birth rate was declining in parallel with a growing number of homeless and abandoned children. "In ten years, the number of parentless children went up by more than 50% to total 720,000 in early 2005," Lakhova said.
She also said that the divorce rate in Russia remained fairly high and that nearly eight million children were being raised in single-parent families.
According to Lakhova, the number of children whose parents were stripped of parental rights, was continuing to rise. In 2004 alone, the figure was 64,000.
Against this background, Lakhova called for the reform of guardianship agencies in the country. "Time has shown that they are ineffective in defending children's rights and do not meet modern standards."
In April, UN experts forecasted that the Russian population, currently totaling 142 million, would fall to 101.5 million people in the first 50 years of the 21st century before reaching a low of 79.5 million in the second half of the century.
