Thursday, November 10, 2011

Sammi Branch

While having a conversation with a two Chinese girls that I know we ended up discussing some things that are relevant to what we have been discussing lately. I discovered that Chinese children are expected to start giving their parents money, supporting them, basically as soon as they are able to. I found this out when the girls I was talking to were surprised to hear that I had a job but that I didn’t send any back home to my parents. I found it just as surprising to hear that when they have jobs that’s what they do and that they are expected to support their parents as adults as well. Also, once the children are married they definitely need to be supporting their parents if they haven’t been already. The Chinese girls thought it was interesting that I still (like many people I know my age) get money from my parents now and then and am not at all expected to support them, and supporting them as they age is still not a primary thought in my head.
Thinking about reasons why this is the norm in China the main thing I came up with was that this partially stems from the level of respect Asian cultures tend to have for their elders. From my discussion with these girls they seemed to put a lot more importance in upholding the utmost respect for their parents. In the United States it seems that it is common and almost expected for children to disobey and disrespect their parents at some point – commonly during adolescence.
When I thought about these customs and how they function in society today (both in the US and China) I started to think that they might be at risk in both countries. They may be at risk for being changed or modified or just at risk for people to fail to meet the norms. In China the one-child-per-family rule has created basically an entire generation of only-children – that leaves one child to support two parents and once that child gets married it means two people responsible for supporting four parents. The girls I spoke with talked about the one child rule as if it weren’t fair because not only did they not get to have any siblings, but then they had this burden of being the only person responsible for taking care of both of their parents. This seems like it will put a lot of strain on this specific social expectation.
In the US the baby-boomers are getting older and retiring but our go-to support system, the economy is not in great shape to support them. It seems like this would be a good time for American children and society to have the norm of being responsible for caring for their parents as they age. As such a large generation hits retirement age it seems like many are facing the reality that for them, retirement age might be much later. If children were expected to take care of their adults as they aged, would these baby-boomers be more able to retire at the supposed retirement age of 65?
The girls from China that I spoke with said that not only was it traditional to care for their aging adults, but they also did it out of respect and as a way to thank them for raising and caring for them. From this conversation with the girls I gained a lot of insight into the mind-set and lifestyle of a Chinese person (at least a Chinese person similar to the girls I was talking to). Something that I had never realized or considered was that this desire and need to support their parents is a big driving force behind why they seem to strive for success so much. In their culture it seems like success is a lot of times equated with the type of job you hold, and a job is considered good if it is high-paying because with a high-paying job you can support yourself and your parents. In turn, in their society to get a high-paying job they must be highly educated, which starts early since it is such a competitive field. If every child is striving to get the best grades and be the most highly educated, it creates tough competition. Another great point they revealed to me was that in china because of this intense competition raising a child is very expensive. They put it like this: As a parent you want the best for you child, you want them to be successful, so you want them to have the same chance as any other kid. So if everyone is sending their child to piano lessons, summer school, and painting classes, you have to send your child to those things too or else they will be at a disadvantage. But putting all of this money and effort into the child pays off, because they know or expect that the child will grow up and start supporting the parent as soon as they can. The child is a good investment, but only if the child is successful. (You can see how the cycle perpetuates itself).
 There are lots of benefits to this cycle however, like highly educated populations. But there must also be downfalls like stress and feelings of incompetency if you don’t meet the high standards. For me this conversation brought up a lot of questions and ideas regarding how society shapes its citizens and how the citizens shape society and also how values and norms can play such a huge role in that.



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