Sunday was Family Day, and while the Ministry of Education marked it with special programs in kindergartens, schools, parent centers and educational colleges, the National Insurance Institute (NII) Research Aministration released the following statistics:

Over 1.01 million families in Israel have children – an average of nearly 2.39 children each, for a total of 2,416,703 children. They received monthly stipend payments totally 5.2 billion shekels for the year, or 433 million shekels a month.

Nearly two-thirds of Israel’s families have one or two children under the age of 18. Specifically, 32% have one child, and 31% have two children. A fifth (20%) of the families have three children, 9% have four, 4% have five, and 4% have six or more.

These figures take into account only children under 18 in the year 2009, and not total births per mother.

Other family statistics for 2009 were less promising, the one on poverty in families with children receiving the most media attention:

  • Of the country’s 130,000 one-parent families, 97% are headed by a woman, and 30% of them are defined as “poor” in that they earn less than half of the national average income.
  • Of the families with children, 23.5% are considered “poor;” these families have 783,600 children, or about a third of of Israel's children.

On the other hand:

One of every 12 shekels paid out by NII in 2009 went to mothers for birth costs – hospitalization, pregnancy care, birth grants and the like, for a total of 4.4 billion shekels.

  • 160,000 babies were born in 2009; 3,500 births were of twins, and 100 were of triplets or more.
  • Some 80,000 families received some 147 million shekels in education grants in 2009.

The Ministry of Education marked Family Day with special programs in kindergartens, schools, parent centers and educational colleges on parenting, family ties, and grandparents. The ministry announced that it had decided to mark the day because of the “increasing recognition of the importance of family in the healthy upbringing of a child, and the increasing awareness of the importance of empowering the family in the educational process.”

The Ministry’s operative assumptions are that “functional parenting is an asset and a resource; parenting can be learned; and parenting today requires recognition and status.”

The central theme in the educational programs is: “From Danger to Opportunity: Parents, Teachers and Students Meet the Challenges Together.”