Student’s Attitudes to Parenthood and the Social Roles of Men and Women

Abstract

The article analyzes the attitudes of young men and women based on a study of 1408 undergraduates of specialists in various fields of training at the age of 20–24 years, which held at the end of 2018 in Moscow and Stavropol. The results processed in IBM SPSS Statistics 23.It established that attitudes of students on the social roles of men and women differ by sex, and largely in the public sphere than in the family sphere and everyday practices. These results are different from a number of European countries where attitudes of young men and women mostly diverge in the private rather than the public sphere. Most students plan to have children (85% of young men and 90% of young women) and more than half of them plan to have two children. No more than one percent of male and female students are the “childfree” or «childhate».Contrary to the hypothesis, both young men and young women highly appreciate the ability of men to perform a paternal role and rarely adhere to the essentialist view of parenthood. Among young men, more often expressed attitude to child-centrism than among young women. The views on parent’ involvement almost did not differ by gender. Students recognize that parenthood is a responsible and difficult job that requires effort and considerable time and effort. For most of the studied variables, students’ religious and ethnic identity is the most differentiating. This applies to maintaining the tradition of patrilineality (the intentions of the young women to take her husband’s name after marriage), attitudes to the distribution of spousal roles, reproductive plans, child-centrism and essentialism in parenting. Social groups of young men and women, who support the views representing risk factors from the point of view of successful marriage, allocated.

Keywords

• students
• ethnic/religious identity
• gender
• social role
• the reproductive attitudes
• parenting
• the child-centrism
• essentialism