Do My Students Love Their Parents? Do My Students Have Siblings?
Written on Apr 27, 2018
I am reposting a fb post from a year ago. We were in Taian at the time. This is a much smaller city (only 4 million) about 300 miles SE of Beijing. I was teaching undergraduate students at Taishan Medical College. My current Ph.D. students at Peking University are different in the number of siblings that they have. Many of them are only children, but still many do have a sibling, and many, many of them spent part of their childhood with their grandparents in rural locations (which they remember very fondly). Only one or two are from one parent families though, and some of these are because of the death of a parent rather than divorce. Quite a difference from what the statistics would be for US college students. I was struck again by the reverence with which they view their families.
From Taishan Medical College undergraduates, April, 2017: "The last few days I have listened to about 125 freshmen one minute presentations on their "families". Boy do I have a shockingly different view of China than I had before. 80%-90% of these students have siblings!!! And I mean naturally born siblings not cousins that they call "sister" and "brother". I asked how this could be when we are told that it is a "one child policy". They said that their parents just had to pay extra money. While some of them may have been parents of girls trying for a boy, some of them obviously were not. One girl had two older brothers! Children were very much more widely spaced: from 4 years to one girl who has a one month old brother at home. (She must be at least 18.) Most had one sibling, but a few had 2. They also usually did not live with their grandparents, but a few did. I am guessing more than in the US. Two of them said that their father's were alcoholics, which i found interesting coming in a culture that "saves face" at all cost. But maybe the overwhelming fact was that every single student was living with both natural parents: not any single parent households. A few had father's employed overseas, but not many. They stated that many of their mothers were "typical housewives" (I thought all women in China were required to work.) Every single one gave testimony to how loved they were by their parents. I don't think any failed to mention that. I can't help wondering how different these presentations would be in the US."
From Taishan Medical College undergraduates, April, 2017: "The last few days I have listened to about 125 freshmen one minute presentations on their "families". Boy do I have a shockingly different view of China than I had before. 80%-90% of these students have siblings!!! And I mean naturally born siblings not cousins that they call "sister" and "brother". I asked how this could be when we are told that it is a "one child policy". They said that their parents just had to pay extra money. While some of them may have been parents of girls trying for a boy, some of them obviously were not. One girl had two older brothers! Children were very much more widely spaced: from 4 years to one girl who has a one month old brother at home. (She must be at least 18.) Most had one sibling, but a few had 2. They also usually did not live with their grandparents, but a few did. I am guessing more than in the US. Two of them said that their father's were alcoholics, which i found interesting coming in a culture that "saves face" at all cost. But maybe the overwhelming fact was that every single student was living with both natural parents: not any single parent households. A few had father's employed overseas, but not many. They stated that many of their mothers were "typical housewives" (I thought all women in China were required to work.) Every single one gave testimony to how loved they were by their parents. I don't think any failed to mention that. I can't help wondering how different these presentations would be in the US."
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