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THE ONE-CHILD POLICY AND PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS: A COMPARISON OF ONE-CHILD WITH MULTIPLE-CHILD FAMILIES IN CHINA*
Facing a high birth rate, a falling mortality rate, and inconsistent policies on family planning from the 1950s to the early 1970s, the People's Republic of China (PRC) launched its widely known one-child policy in 1979. The intention was to restrict population growth by reducing fertility through family planning and thereby to conserve the nation's resources to advance economic development. The effectiveness of the one-child policy has varied greatly because policy regulations are differentially carried out by officials of provinces, municipalities, counties, communes, and minority regions. Generally speaking, the state policy has had greater acceptance in urban areas but is far less rigidly enforced by local officials in rural areas and for certain national minorities, which can have a second child under certain circumstances (Chow and Chen, 1994).1
Since the one-child policy's inception, scholars, researchers, and policy makers have assessed its impact as having more negative than positive effects. Major policy impacts range from a reduced childbearing burden for women and less childrearing responsibility for parents to breakdown of the kinship structure, potential threat to old age security, health hazards for the mother, female infanticide, forced abortion and sterilization, and problematic personality development of the only child (Coale and Banister, 1994; Chen, 1985; Cheung, 1988; Chow and Chen, 1994; Croll, Davin, and Kane, 1985; Dalsimer and Nisonoff, 1987; Falbo, 1987; Greenhalgh, 1990; Larsen, 1990; Poston, 1990; Poston and Falbo, 1993; Shanghai Preschool Education Study Group, 1980; Tien, Zhang, Ping, Li, and Liang, 1992; Tuljapurkar, Li and Feldman, 1995; Zhao, 1995).
Despite these changes, Quoss and Zhao (1995) observe that research on parent-child relationships in contemporary China is meager. They stress the importance of identifying and examining "new characteristics which may be developing in the parent-child relationship in the unique setting of China, under its one child family policy (Quoss and Zhao, 1995, p.266)." This paper aims to document child-centeredness as an emergent family phenomenon characterizing parent-child relationships in China and to provide explanations for why such a phenomenon is occurring. We divide our discussion into three parts: (1) a review of major theoretical approaches that have generally been used to study parent-child relationships; (2) a report of major findings on...