To begin with, I would like to say that an average Russian family consists of one or two parents, one or two kids.
Children continue to live with their parents after they come of age if they study in a higher school in their home town. It is not usual of Russians to send their aged relatives to old people's homes, so grandparents also might live with the family, so that the younger relatives could take care of them. All in all relatives within a family are very emitionally attached, parents tend to take care and try to take care and guide their children for as long as they can.
Normally both parents work. Today more and more people get engaged in office work, business, infrastructure, while blue-collar positions are not so popular and prestigious.
This tendency also affects higher education: more and more students are willing to get white-collar professions (programming, management, social sphere) although the economy is in great need of workers. Moreover today higher education has been made a must-have by public opinion.
Russians tend to spend their free time rather passively – watching TV, surfing the web (which is growing more and more popular not only among the young, but also among the older generations). Partly this can be explained by the lack of leisure facilities (like municipal sport centres, winter sport facilities etc).
The popularity of the Internet and the spread of computer technologies promote the rapid development of so called social networks (vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru and many more), which now unite an overall majority of Russians aged from 11 till 50.
As for family life, normally Russian families live either in their own apartments or apartments rented by the municipality – from one to three rooms with a bathroom and a kitchen. Many families keep pets (cats and dogs are the most common, but some keep parrots or fish). Due to Russian traditions neighbours tend to be quite united although now this is becoming more and more rare. Still collectivist tendency is very significant in Russian nature. Now as the wellfare of Russians is growing (or was growing before the world crisis), practically every Russian family owns a car.
A usual weekday goes as follows:
- get up at 6-7 o'clock, have some breakfast
- work from 9 till 5 or 6 pm (or study – depending on the curricullum students may be occupied from 8 am till 8.30 pm)
- supper at home (normally prepared by the wife/mother/grandmother)
- go to sleep at 10-11 pm
At weekends adults stay at home doing laundry and other useful things. The young spend their evenings at nightclubs or go to concerts. More and more young people get involved in such sports as snowboarding, skateboarding, skiing and skating.
About 90% of Russian families have country houses – the so-called "dachas", where they spend their summer holidays. Mostly those country houses are situated in small villages on banks of a river or a lake, have a sauna and some ground nearby, used for agriculture, which is not essentially necessary, but is traditionally done as some kind of hobby.
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