A secret of child rearing you'd never hear on Oprah

Jake Rudnitsky desribes the horrors of living in shitty boroughs of the city of Irkutsk in this article.
He wrote:
But for at least a few of the residents of these crumbling houses, they mark progress. For all their faults, these houses do give poor young couples their only opportunity to move out from their parents'. Twenty-four-year-old Lena and her husband have been renting a small two-room apartment in a house dating back to 1890 for four years already. They have a two-year-old daughter Katya, who is well behaved like all kids kept slightly hungry.



Это бы было смешно, если бы не было так грустно - it would be funny it weren't so sad, they say in Russian... What else can I add?