Plight of the Little Emperors: China's Only Children

We are by now all aware of China's long-standing one-child policy. And we are also aware of the continual speculation about the resulting demographic imbalances, national preoccupations, and adverse impact on the country, it's families, and it's children. This article in Psychology Today places in perspective these speculations and concerns, what is myth and what is fact, what is better and what is worse than we might have expected.

First, the policy was set in place not only as a method of population control, but with designs on creating an elite generation of high potential and high-achieving youngsters. They could not have known how successful they would be.

When China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy's most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. For the Chinese people, however, the policy's greater purpose was to turn out a group of young elites who would each enjoy the undivided resources of their whole family—the so-called xiao huangdi, or "little emperors." The plan was to "produce a generation of high-quality children to facilitate China's introduction as a global power," explains Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy. But while these well-educated, driven achievers are fueling the nation's economic boom, their generation has become too modern too quickly, glutted as it is with televisions, access to computers, cash to buy name brands, and the same expectations of middle-class success as Western kids.

Still, there is no way to reasonably expect a new market economy to grow as dynamicly and broadly as would be required to fully accomodate the new generation with the kinds of jobs they had prepared themselves for. For that matter, it is not reasonable for the most robust market economy to provide a disproportionately large percentage of jobs for the professional and management ranks. The most successful economies still need a significant percentage of labor-class workers. And so disappointments, and on a large scale, were inevitable.

The shift in temperament has happened too fast for society to handle. China is still a developing nation with limited opportunity, leaving millions of ambitious little emperors out in the cold; the country now churns out more than 4 million university graduates yearly, but only 1.6 million new college-level jobs. Even the strivers end up as security guards. China may be the world's next great superpower, but it's facing a looming crisis as millions of overpressurized, hypereducated only children come of age in a nation that can't fulfill their expectations.

But the failure of China's economy to provide the expected jobs, social status and lifestyle is just the final blow for so many only children and their families. The destabilizing process had already forced unhealthy, imbalanced lives on them from early childhood.

The pressure to succeed was all the greater given that his parents' own dreams had been dashed during China's Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong closed schools and sent difficult-to-control intellectuals to be "reeducated" by working the fields. His own dreams destroyed, he poured all his hopes and ambitions into his son. "Because of the Cultural Revolution, my parents literally wasted 10 years," explains Wang, 29, who was among the first Chinese only kids born under the one-child policy. "I was explicitly told that they had lost a lot in their lives, so they wanted me to get it back for them."

Then, how could we be surprised when competitive, self-preservation instincts of parents were carried to extremes by the all-or-nothing, one-child policy forced on them and their children? (And why should we be surprised that the perverse social extremes visited on one Chinese generation should result in an equally perverse social exteme of another sort being visited on the next?)

In recent years, however, Chinese parents have sometimes blurred the line between sacrifice and slavery in aiding their child's success: Mothers carry their child's backpack around; couples forgo lunch so their kid can have plentiful snacks or new Nikes. Vanessa Fong recalls meeting one mother who resisted hospitalization for her heart and kidney troubles because she feared it might interfere with her daughter's gao kao preparation; when Fong gave the mother money for medication, it mostly went to expensive food for her daughter.

"In China, the term for a one-child family is a 'risky family,'" says Baochang Gu, a demography professor at Beijing's Renmin University who advises the Chinese government on the one-child policy. "If something happened to that child, it would be a disaster. So from the parents' point of view, the spoiling is all necessary to protect them."

It is understandable, then, that Chinese students tend to have fewer friends; they most often view classmates as competitors in a zero-sum game they must win. And talking to their parents, who cannot allow themselves to be understanding or sympathetic, is a waste of time and a sure way to create further misunderstanding. So where do they find escape and psychological release?

Many young only children opt for escape from reality through online gaming worlds. Every day, the nation's 113,000 Internet cafés teem with twitchy, solitary players—high school and university students, dropouts, and unemployed graduates—an alarming number of whom remain in place for days without food or sleep. Official estimates put the number of Chinese Internet addicts at over 2 million, and the government considers it such a serious threat that it deploys volunteer groups to prowl the streets and prevent teens from entering Internet cafés.

The mostly male youth who turn to virtual realms find there a place to realize ambitions that are frustrated in real life, says Kimberly Young, a psychologist and Internet addiction expert who has advised Chinese therapists. "With the click of a button, they go from a 19-year-old with no social life to a great warrior in World of Warcraft," Young says.

But, for those inclined to conclude that all the problems were unavoidable with a generation of only children, the article is quick to make the point that being only children was not by itself the problem.

Yet despite the stereotype, the research has revealed no evidence that only kids have more negative traits than their peers with siblings—in China or anywhere else. "The only way only children are reliably different from others is they score slightly higher in academic achievement," explains Toni Falbo, a University of Texas psychology professor who has gathered data on more than 4,000 Chinese only kids. Sure, some little emperors are bratty, but no more than children with siblings.

It's just that their psychological issues stem not from a lack of siblings but from the harsh academic competition and parental prodding that pervade their lives. Susan Newman, a New Jersey psychologist and only-child expert, says the notion that little emperors are bossy, self-obsessed little brats is simply part of the greater myth of only kids as damaged goods. "Pinning their problems on having no siblings is really making them a scapegoat," she says. Being an only child is not the problem.

Perhaps, so. But in the case of China's one-child policy, it is still hard to separate the conditions imposed by families and culture on their only children, from the existence of a generation of only children. That is, being only children may not be the problem, per se, but the problem unavoidably follows from the reality of a generation of Chinese only children.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20080623-000004&print=1