Parental behavior of women and men is viewed through the prism of deviations and variations in the development of institutions. Variations are sparsely distributed attitudes and practices that exist for a long period of time, they just undergo modifications in different social conditions. Deviations, unlike variations, are a source of social change; new attitudes and behavioral practices are widely spread and are gradually becoming the norm. The author describes the practices of parental behavior for which new data were available to the author. We used Russian and foreign statistical sources, data from representative studies of RLMS-HSE — 2004, 2012, 2020; ESS-2018; as well as sample studies of adolescents in Moscow in 1994, 2010 and 2022 under the guidance of the author. It is shown that the proportion of children registered by both biological parents who are not married is gradually increasing. Fragile families of cohabiting parents are spreading, which in Russia so far account for about a tenth of all parents with minor children. Stepfamilies with teenagers are spreading, at least in the capital. In remarriages, parents are also well off according to a number of indicators, as in the first ones. The positive trends of paternal participation are shown. More teenagers living in maternal families, from 1994 to 2022, meet with fathers who do not live with them. At the same time, mothers still spend more than five times more time caring for and taking care of their children. The right to issue paternity leave for child care is practically not used. In Russia, the actual practice of joint custody of parents over children after divorce is not legally fixed. Such a measure would be more effective both from the point of view of children’s well-being and their financial support by a parent living separately. Variations in the development of the institution of parenthood are the families of mothers, who have never been married, and divorced mothers, living without partners. In the last almost twenty years, these indicators have been stable. Childlessness is not yet a problem in Russia, it is an established variation in comparison with a number of countries in which the childlessness rate is increasing. In comparison with the EU countries, a small proportion of both men and women in Russia are tolerant of the adoption of children by same-sex couples. Such well-established variations as having many children, adoption, guardianship, loss of parental rights, abandonment of newborns, as well as new ones, for example, parenthood due to the use of assisted reproductive technologies, the practice of parenthood in transnational families, were not analyzed. It was found that according to the available indicators, there are more prosperous mothers and fathers among married, first or second time, the least prosperous among widows and divorced fathers.
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