Adolescent Attitudes Regarding Family Obligations in Mainland China

Towards the end of the 20th century, the People’s Republic of China aggressively
began what is generally believed to be an irreversible shift from a socialist system to a
free-market economy. The opportunity for the attainment of wealth and property
through individual initiative in free-market economies has weakened traditions of family
duty and obligation in other societies in the past, and we wanted to examine whether
the same would be true for teenagers in China.
Adolescence is an ideal developmental stage at which to examine the potential
impact of social change on family relationships and values, particularly the tradition of
family obligation. Contemporary Chinese adolescents belong to the first generation in
recent history that can expect to live their full adult lives in a market economy. Thus,
their attitudes regarding their family obligations are important indicators of the potential
long-term impact of social change on Chinese traditions regarding the family.
The economic transition in China has been carefully limited by the government to
selected urban centers, and we believed that an urban-rural comparison could be an
important indicator of the impact of economic change on the sense of family obligation.
Thus, in the spring of 1999, we had a total of 700 high school students, about half living
in a large city and half in a rural area of China, complete questionnaires assessing their
sense of obligation to support, assist, and respect the family.
We found that despite the dramatic economic and social changes occurring in
China, both urban and rural adolescents continued to report a strong sense of obligation
to support, assist, and respect the authority of their families.
However, because we collected data at only a single point in time, it is possible
that adolescents’ attitudes, although strong, have nevertheless declined from prior
years. Yet even if such a decline did occur, Chinese teenagers appeared to retain
enough of their traditional values that their sense of family obligation was substantially
stronger than those of American adolescents with both Chinese and European
backgrounds observed in a previous study.
This current study also found that urban male adolescents reported a weaker
sense of family obligation than rural male adolescents or urban and rural female
adolescents. To the extent that urban-rural comparisons test the impact of China’s
economic reforms, these results suggest that the changes taking place in contemporary
China may be affecting boys’ sense of obligation but not girls’.
This suggests that urban males may be starting a long-term trend away from
their adherence to family traditions. Continued research is needed in order to determine
whether such a trend will spread to other segments of the adolescent population, and, if
so, what implications it may have for future intergenerational relationships and
adolescent development.

Summarized from Child Development, Vol. 75, Issue 1, Attitudes Toward Family
Obligation Among Adolescents in Contemporary Urban and Rural China by A.J. Fuligni
and W. Zhang. Copyright 2004 The Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved.