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The eighth Family of the Year contest took place in 2023 with the participation of 384 families which won the regional contests. Winners were determined in five categories: Large Family, Young Family, Rural Family, Golden Family, and Family as the Guardian of Traditions.

Around 600,000 people (more than 100,000 family teams) from 89 regions along with their relatives who live in 81 countries, participate in This Runs in Our Family contest. The remote stage of the contest where families work together to complete tasks on a variety of topics, will last until January 31. Regional semi-finals and the final contest will take place this year.

The Family – Loved Ones forum is being held at the VDNKh exhibition centre on January 19–23 with over 1,000 people taking part, including family dynasties from each region, large families, young and foster families, and families of heroes of Russia and veterans of the special military operation.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends.

I am pleased to welcome you to Moscow, and I wish you success in these contests now and going forward. We have come up with a gamut of such events to fill the Year of the Family which began in 2024 with various activities, 300 or even more of them.

Without a doubt, you and your families, your children are the main participants in these events, and the more children, the better. As you may be aware, yesterday, I signed Executive Order on the status of a large family. People who I met with before repeatedly raised this issue with me. This is a matter of practical importance, and I hope it will play out accordingly and that large families will enjoy equal status throughout the country.

Without a doubt, I can say that a large family is the mainstay of the country; any family is, but a large family even more so. Why is a large family so important? Because, and you know this better than I, the core qualities of a person – respect for older people, love and care for the younger ones, hard work, and everything related to this organism that keeps the family and the country together – are instilled in the family.

These are the very traditional values that we constantly talk about and support. In fact, our entire domestic policy and our economic policy are focused on supporting the family. Every national programme that, I hope, you have heard about, centres around the family.

I realise that much remains to be done. You probably know that the state can consider having done everything to the best of its abilities only when there is no need for special programmes, and the routine functioning of the economic organism and the national economy and the social sphere will take care of every issue a family, no matter how many children, may have, and the support measures that we are developing would kick in automatically.

In fact, you probably use it too; you know, we tried to do this, and we have developed packages of support measures, and now, we have these support programmes covering the time from when the mother is pregnant until the child’s 18^th birthday, starting with maternity capital (833,000 for the second child, and about 600,000 for the first). But now, if you notice, these programmes will also be in effect for young people under 23 years old who are full-time students.

That’s all I wanted to say for now. I am a great talker, but I would like to hear your assessment of our work, how we are doing, and maybe suggestions on what else should be done, or perhaps adjusted from among the measures already available and functioning.

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