China's family structure and its effect on the Chinese society ~Jeanette~

The core value in the Chinese family, filial piety requires that children or grandchildren respect and care for their parents or grandparents. In this family system, sons are permanent members of their natal family and retain life-time financial relationships with their parents. They are expected to contribute to their parents’ economic well-being even after they are married themselves. Thus, it is in their self-interest for parents to invest in sons because they may reap long-term returns from this investment. In contrast, daughters are only temporary members of their natal families before marriage, upon which a woman serves her husband’s extended family. Thus, due to the limited time during which daughters serve their natal families, parents often extract resources from unmarried daughters, for example in terms of remittances from daughters’ market labor or housework, to improve the family budget and invest in sons. 

It as long been known that in China, parents favour boys over girls. After the one child policy was introduced to curb the rapidly growing population in China, parents have started to try harder for a boy. In fact, when a girl has been given birth to, the mother is usually painfully, innocently discriminated. Crueller, when the parents realise that their future child is a girl, many opt for immediate abortion, even though it's illegal. Due to these actions, the birth rates of boys and girls per year are very uneven. In fact, china had to import brides for, overseas to marry the sons as there are too many boys and hardly a single girl for each boy to marry. 

This shows that in the traditional family structure, girls are sadly much less favoured compared to the boys, and are thus not treated as equally and fairly. Now, girls are not as discriminated as before, as parents start to realise their selfish actions, in fact, some children also take in their mother's surname, in some cases if the surname is very rare and unique and the parents want to keep the surname to carry down for the next generations. With these little bits of improvements in the family structure where girls and boys are treated more equally, it is a relief for all potential girl babies and mothers in the future. 

By:Jeanette Tang(18)