Introduction. Modern youth is included today in a variety of social institutions, within which their attitudes, identity values are formed. Sociological studies of recent decades clearly show that the family, despite all the variety of formal and substantive changes in modern institutions of family and marriage, occupies a leading place in the scale of value preferences of young Russians, transforming the matrimonial attitudes of young people and providing a complex mechanism of social integration. The multivariance and dynamism of modern family and marriage relations (cohabitation, changes in the age limits of marriage, changes in the limit of the duration of marriage, an increase in the number of remarriages, the absence of children in marriage, etc.) enhances the role and importance of individualized strategies for young people to enter this social institution, providing it has the opposite effect, in terms of further changes and transformations. Such a transformation, according to the authors, is typical for the modern institution of a young family, which, due to a number of interrelated trends, and in particular the trend of “postponed marriage”, may cease to be an actual social phenomenon that allows young people to use some state types of assistance and support provided for families. of this kind. Methods. As part of the work, an analysis of legal documents is carried out: the Federal Law “On Youth Policy in the Russian Federation”, the Federal Target Program «Housing» for 2015-2020, the State Program «Providing affordable and comfortable housing and utilities for citizens of the Russian Federation». The empirical basis of the work is: data from all-Russian studies and the results of the sociological study «Marriage age: preferences of young people in the city of Rostov-on-Don», conducted in 2021 (N=200). Results and its discussion. The legal acts available in the Russian Federation have now begun to fix clearer criteria for the term "young family". The authors of the article believe that changes in normative terminology are associated with a steady trend towards an increase in the average age of both the bride and groom upon marriage, which in turn is due to many factors: the individualization of romantic relationships, increased freedom of choice, the change in public regulators of matrimonial attitudes to economic. Despite an attempt to formulate certain criteria for the term "young family" in the legislative framework of the Russian Federation, the authors note that the transformation of marriage with the tendencies of individualism, delayed marriage, a period of self-realization and delayed, and sometimes completely unrealized reproductive functions of the family, leads to the fact that the phenomenon young family, in the form in which it exists today, in the conditions of Russian society becomes elusive.