Vyborg playground. Photo: passer-by/Flickr. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Some rights reserved.Little Alesha is pushing his stroller down the boulevard. While he practices his new walking skills, Nadia, Alesha’s mom, laments the insufficiency of daycare in the city: “I’ve heard that there is a new law now, according to which they must offer you a slot in a municipal daycare when your child turns three. Still, I hear about all these kids who couldn’t get in. I have no idea what I am going to do. I wanted to get Alesha into daycare soon, when he turns two, but I hear that it’s close to impossible these days.”
Nadia lives in a large provincial city that, similarly to other cities in Russia, suffers from a shortage of daycare facilities, which often contradicts the official state rhetoric encouraging women to have multiple children. Although this issue has been at the centre of national and regional politics, municipal and regional governments find it hard to keep pace with the growing demand for daycare. Nadia’s older daughter is in municipal daycare already. After she was born, Nadia took maternity leave and stayed at home for 18 months. Less than a year after resuming work, she got pregnant again and took maternity leave again. Nadia can, of course, stay at home until Alesha turns three, she told me, but it is hard on the family financially (as only the first year and a half are paid) and she was actually eager to go back to work. I asked Nadia if she was considering private daycare or a nanny. “No,” she replies without much hesitation. “It’s either municipal daycare or babushka [grandmother]. I don’t trust anyone else when it comes to caring for my kids.”
Nadia’s story is only one of many I heard during the year I spent in a large provincial city in the Urals, where I was conducting an ethnographic study of Russia’s so-called “demographic crisis.”
