Families, kids, and other things

It's a crowded morning in the subway, and a young couple, a grandma, and a young boy are traveling somewhere together.  The boy's feeling fussy, and the dad takes him to the other side of the subway car.  But after a while they come back to the mom and grandma, and the mom holds out her arms to the child.  But he holds out his arms to the grandma, who takes him and holds him closely.

Barbara and I are eating in a small cafeteria near our hotel (sometimes the easiest way to figure out how to order and what you're getting is to be able to see and point to it!).  We're the oldest ones eating there.  There are a number of young women, older than students, but still 20-something, who are often selecting items for take-out containers.  But we also see young men about the same age, sitting together or alone at one of the tables, eating their food in the cafe.

We go to Hangzhou, to see the area around West Lake.  By Chinese standards today, it's only a medium sized town--but over 6 million people, roughly the population of Minnesota (!).  We are walking around the shoreline, with many local folks enjoying the view, visiting, snacking, and feeding the white birds in the trees.  A young man, and then his friend, ask if they can chat with us, wanting to practice their English, and we wind up spending some time with them.  They seem nice-enough guys, apparently employed in hotel management and some sort of "design" work, but neither is married.  I ask one if he would like to be, but he says it's hard, because the girl's parents will want to know if he has money, and owns a home: "no money, no honey," is the American slang he uses to describe his situation.

Family and children and relatives and kinship have been a key element of Chinese (and all societies until very recent times) society.  Yet even here families are challenged and changing.
One of the unintended consequences of a better standard of living and better health care, as well as more widely available education, has been in China (and elsewhere) a period of rapid population growth.  Death rates were coming down, people were living longer, yet people's desire for children had not yet changed.  And today China has 1.3 billion people.

In response to this problem, which even revolutionary communist policies could not contain (and which could undermine their progress), in 1979 China adopted a "one-child" policy, at least for the Han majority (there are also 56 official national minorities, who could have more), supported by a population of increasingly educated women (which lowers birth rates in most countries), modern birth control, urbanization (as the country becomes predominantly urban rather than rural) and the availability (sometimes forced) of abortion.

As we wander about, we do often see what are apparently "one-child" families, like this one at the Shanghai Zoo.  But we are as likely to see a grandpa or grandma, or both, with a single child as we are a parent.  As it's become increasingly important for both parents to work to keep up with the demands of housing inflation and a consumer economy (everyone seems to have a cellphone, at least on the subway!), grandparents are often doing the child-care during the day.  

And more grand-parents are available--they're living longer, but also with the one-child policy (just abolished in 2015), if grandparents who themselves had one child, and whose child in turn married some other grandparents' one child,  there can be a 4:1 ratio of grandparents (two sets) to the single grandchild that may result.  Young children could easily spend more time with a grandparent than their parents.  And an unhappy child on a subway might find more comfort with its familiar grandma than with a parent.  (I know: small sample!)

The other change related to all this is that the historic preference for boy babies (to inherit, to carry the family name, and so forth) has persisted until just recently.  When a couple was limited to just one chance for a son it was tempting to use the modern twin innovations of amniocentesis (learning the sex of the fetus quite early) and an abortion that's easier and safer when performed early in the pregnancy, to choose not to have a girl.  And so, today, it's estimated that by 2020 there will be a surplus of about 30 million men, compared to women.  Perhaps our experience watching young women picking up food to take home for supper on way back from work, and young men sitting at tables eating their suppers together or alone, makes sense.  And, too, perhaps young men facing the dilemma of wanting to marry but not having the resources to offer a woman (or satisfy her parents).

Will relaxing the one-child policy change all this?  Perhaps--but only slowly, over a generation.  And the recent article in the English language Shanghai Daily (summarizing local sociological research!) is titled "Pros and Cons of Having a Second Child."  People are now kind of used to planning for one child, and many in the survey said that financial pressures would keep them from wanting more (56% weren't planning to have a second).  And, interestingly, those who were planning a second had a preference for a girl by a margin of 30 to 13% (the rest no preference).  Might daughters take better care of elderly parents?

We might think about different but equally big changes in marriage, family and child-rearing roles in the U.S.  A drop in the birthrate that was encouraged by policy in China has happened in the U.S. as couples (especially well-educated couples) marry later, when women often have good jobs to weigh against more children, the cost of educating children has risen dramatically, and more.  On the other hand, same-sex couples can now legally marry (but not in China), which provides the legal and economic security for them to desire more children.  Or a woman such as the one at the right can marry in middle-age and just be happy going to the zoo in China!