An incredible bill has been submitted to the State Duma. It is envisaged to change the concept of “child’s interests” in the Family Law. The authors of the initiative explain that this is how they combat child-centered ideology and try to eliminate psychological manipulation when parents divorce. It is also emphasized that in this divorce, one should act according to “traditional values” and not according to the child’s opinion. And here, of course, everything is interesting. Why the child’s voice is so scary and what the “traditional values” are in the context of divorce. Meanwhile, discussions have already begun in society.
Most importantly, this news excited the average person. Many decided that they wanted to legislate to take children away from their mothers and transfer them to their fathers during a divorce.
This is how people interpreted the “traditional values” clause. However, some points in the explanatory note on the project seem to really need such an interpretation. One, for example: “A third of children in Russia (about 11 million) live with one parent; about 10 million of them live with their mothers in conditions of father deprivation.”
Then we set off, disagreements arose about primitive-poskonnom, family-domostroyevsky, skrepono-tradition. However, it is absolutely unclear what kind of tradition we can talk about in the context of divorce. Before the revolution, divorces were exceptional and insignificant in number: according to the 1897 census, there was only one divorced man per 1,000 married men. You can’t take away any established practice for solving child-related problems here.
Of course there are stereotypes. Thus, the stereotype that children after the separation of spouses remain only with their father may have arisen thanks to the plot of “Anna Karenina” – although, by the way, no one gave the hero of the novel the right to divorce. Yes, of course, there were much more such stories where spouses separated, but did not go through the divorce procedure in the church. However, things developed differently for the children there.
The case of the classic’s sister, Maria Tolstoy, is interesting. She left her husband and even at first wanted to formalize everything with dignity (her writer brother was very fussed about this), but then she gave up the idea of u200bu200bbringing everything to a legal conclusion and simply went abroad. Interestingly, she left with her three children.
In official divorce cases, the future fate of the child was rarely clear. For example, the poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov, after the humiliating process of recognizing himself as an adulterer, almost lost contact with his daughter from his first marriage – his former mother-in-law cut off the possibility of communication.
It is not possible to understand the Soviet period experience with “traditional values”. After the revolution, of course, the separation of spouses became much easier (but still more difficult than now) and, accordingly, the number of broken families increased sharply (but still there are many times more of them now). In most cases, children stayed with their mothers; the father could lay claim to them only if the mother herself abandoned them or if her moral character or beliefs did not correspond at all to the high ideals of Soviet society.
For example, a woman may lose her children because of her stubborn devotion to religion. Here is an excerpt from a court decision in 1950: “Their mother cannot be left to raise the children because, in her opinion, the mother cannot educate them in the communist spirit. Since the plaintiff is a member of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), he can certainly provide the children with a proper education.” However, the number of ideological women who were ready to pay the price for their views by separating them from their children was almost non-existent.
If children began to stay with their father more often after the separation, this happened in recent years. Sometimes this is a free mutual decision between a man and a woman. Sometimes it is the result of a lawsuit.
Interestingly, claims made by fathers to establish a place of residence with them are met in about 60% of cases, and similar claims from women are met in 77%. As you can see, the difference is not dozens, not even enough to scream universal injustice. In addition, demands from fathers are partially unmet because 15% of male plaintiffs themselves reject their demands stated in this process.
In general, judicial practice shows that mothers and fathers are truly equal in their rights, and if most children live with us after divorce from their mothers, this is because Only 5% of fathers even say they want their children to live with them. The plaintiff’s gender does not determine whether the request to determine the child’s place of residence will be met. The main factors are the child’s age, the degree of attachment to each of the parents, the socio-psychological stability of the parents, property status and, if the child is over 10 years old, his own opinion.
And it is precisely the consideration of this view that is now declared unusual, unnecessary, harmful, speculative, in short, weak. There is a certain logic in this. Not asking children is actually a long-standing tradition of ours that was formed during the time of the tsars and strengthened during the Soviet period. For centuries “we haven’t said a word to the snots.” When things moved a little in that direction, those at the top suddenly got scared and decided they had to retreat.
However, the initiative to amend the Family Code is explained not by some unfounded fears, but by “orientation towards the national security strategy of the Russian Federation and the concept of state family policy for the period until 2025.” But the explanation is very fancy. They talk about a break with “the child-centered system that was imposed on our state in the 90s and the approach that compares the child’s opinion with the views of the parents, completely unusual for our people.”
So how come they want to rewrite the law to spite the West? The unusual contrast between the views of children and parents is also interesting, of course. It is a matter of curiosity how Turgenev will comment on this issue. And by the way, if this is the case, shouldn’t “Fathers and Sons” be kicked out of the school curriculum? In order not to disturb the souls of these little ones.
By the way, there are a lot of problems with school in general. If you open the Federal State Education Standard, in almost every paragraph there is a passage that talks about the importance of students forming their own opinions. The developers of the educational standard, of course, made a mistake.
However, let’s take a break from school, there is still talk of the bill requiring changes to the Family Law. There are also some surprising passages in the project’s explanatory note. It turns out that “unhealthy emphasis on the idea of u200bu200ba small child” must be eliminated, because “a child must be raised by both parents, even if they are separate.” I’m sorry, but how do we implement this? Then you should not only ask children, but also stop paying attention to parents. You are giving joint custody by force! No, shared custody is actually great. But only when he does so of his own free will. How to force it? So what does the child’s opinion have to do with it? Nine out of ten young people want to live with both mother and father. So what’s the point of this option being impossible?
In general, everything is very unclear. What is the bill about? What do they want to achieve? Why is it so important to silence children? So what exactly are our traditional family values?
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the position of the editors.