RESOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL CONVENTION OF FATHERS HOLDING LEADERSHIP POSITIONS IN SOCIAL ASSOCIATIONS, CREATIVE TEAMS, AND CLUBS

TO ALL THE FATHERS OF ALTAI TERRITORY

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We, the attendees of a territorial Convention of Fathers Holding Leadership Positions in Social Associations, Creative Teams, and Clubs, have elected to release the following statement:

Since contemporary market conditions keep fathers fully occupied in providing materially for their families, the father’s nurturative function has been weakened, by and large, in the modern family. Beset by harsh economic demands and besieged by ubiquitous societal difficulties, the father-as-nurturer has been torn from the family. The acquisition and retention of the status of husband and father has evidently become a serious societal problem, since life outside of the family also connotes life outside of parenthood. There is a need today to promote a stronger role for the older male generation in conveying the positive experience of fatherhood.

That being so, we consider it imperative to:

-- Develop the idea of responsible fatherhood both by government action and through social initiatives, based upon our nation’s historical and cultural traditions in the transmission of generational experience of modeling responsible fatherhood;

-- Create in Altai Territory and elsewhere in the country conditions conducive to the full public dissemination of the idea of healthy family relations in the area of responsible fatherhood;

-- Encourage an active media focus on information relative to healthy family relationships, as they pertain to the molding of a responsible social awareness regarding the discharge of parental, and particularly paternal, responsibilities;

-- Create conditions that will raise the prestige of men in the classroom, in particular by increasing salaries for teaching staffs;

-- Step up the kind of patriotic upbringing for young people that draws its examples from Russia’s glorious traditions;

-- Hold a Father’s Day in Altai Territory in affirmation of the state’s official recognition of fatherhood as one of the basic life functions of every man, along with those of “breadwinner” and “protector”;

-- Convene regular meetings of the active nucleus of the fathers’ movement in Altai Territory;

-- Enhance the prestige of serving in Russia’s Army and also engage the officers’ corps in making their charges into real men who are responsible for their own destinies and those of their children;

-- Build up the material/technical and technological resources available to military and patriotic upbringing and public physical education and athletics facilities and services, primarily those used by young people, and, in particular, finalize plans to build a ski factory in Altai;

-- Draw the attention of state and social bodies to the need to improve and maintain reproductive health among men and male adolescents in Altai Territory and elsewhere;

-- Ramp up campaigns to promote a healthy lifestyle and combat drug addiction and other socially conditioned diseases;

-- Amplify the psychological culture in men that emphasizes the importance of passing on positive experience relative to shaping the image of a responsible father;

-- Ban television programs that are amoral and encourage men to act irresponsibly toward their families and toward society as a whole.

We are certain that our suggestions will garner both public and official support. Issues relating to the awareness of a father’s responsibility for what happens to his children should today be accorded priority status in the overall context of family outreach.

Adopted on 28 February 2003 by the Territorial Convention of Fathers Holding Leadership Positions in Social Associations, Creative Teams, and Clubs City of Barnaul

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