Once upon a time, in the taste of the Spring Festival, there must be comings and goings, lively relatives, and this is also an unforgettable Spring Festival memory for many people. But now, the younger generation is not interested in visiting relatives during the New Year, and they are even more negligent, lazy or even disdain to visit relatives during the New Year.
Why does this phenomenon occur? In China's highly compressed modernization process, the acceleration of urbanization, industrialization, and social mobility has brought about the separation of living and lifestyle differentiation among relatives; the rise of the nuclear family has changed the family relationship structure from generation to generation; independent and individualized lifestyles It further marginalizes kinship. A variety of factors have changed and contributed to the perception and behavior of the younger generation towards kinship.
As the objective result of economic and social development, the weakening of kinship relations may not be too worrying. Right now, how to guide the younger generation to understand social relationships, including relatives, and return to the kinship network at the right time is worth our attention and exploration.
1. "Invisible" relatives
This Spring Festival, homesick wanderers set off on their way home as they wish, taste the "taste of mother", appreciate the familiar street scenes, and enjoy free time... Going home is full of expectations and warmth, but for many young people, going back There is also a sad "close" at home.
Zhao Jin, a 24-year-old girl from Shanxi, said frankly that she has "mixed joys and sorrows" about going home for the New Year.
Having not been home for three years, she naturally cherished this reunion with her family, but visiting relatives, which almost took up the entire holiday, made her a little troubled.
"When I close my eyes, all I can think of is the super-high-decibel noise, the children yelling, and the endless gossip of the adults," she said.
Zhao Jin said frankly that because she has been studying and working abroad for many years, she no longer has many common topics and languages with her relatives, and the chats often fall into awkward conversations.
Unless there are very special circumstances or things involving parents, I usually don't take the initiative to contact relatives.
It is not uncommon among today's young people to feel neglected to socialize and interact with relatives.
In the random survey conducted by the reporter, most of the post-90s and post-00s around me would not arrange to visit relatives in their personal Spring Festival plans if they did not consider the requirements of their parents.
According to Zhao Jin, some classmates and friends around her are no longer so "active" in inviting relatives to witness major life events such as marriage and childbirth. .
In order to get a rough idea of how common the weakening of kinship is among young people, during the winter vacation of 2020, Hu Xiaowu, an associate professor at the School of Sociology of Nanjing University, took advantage of the opportunity for students to return to their hometowns for the holidays to conduct a social survey.
After statistical analysis of 1,200 valid samples, it was found that the vast majority of post-90s and post-00s have nothing to do at home and hardly contact relatives.
Previously, a related survey conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on nearly 4,000 young people also showed that more than 80% of the respondents had contact with their parents and relatives once or twice a year, and nearly 1/5 of them basically did not. visit relatives.
Promoting marriages, spying on privacy, and keen comparisons... In the past few years, young people's complaints about relatives were mostly described and discussed as "breaking boundaries" and "intergenerational conflicts".
In this regard, Hang Suhong, an associate researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that this is a subjective manifestation of young people's lack of willingness to interact with relatives and communicate emotionally.
Hu Xiaowu believes that the downplaying of kinship does not mean the real separation of kinship or the abandonment of family ties.
At present, this phenomenon is more common among youth and adolescents, "the proportion may have exceeded 70%, or even higher."
2. Why does familial affection fade away
In the past, relatives who "broken the bones and still connected the tendons" didn't kiss each other?
Although Zhao Jin's parents are psychologically prepared for the alienation of their daughter from relatives - after all, as the old saying goes, "One generation of relatives, second generation, third generation and fourth generation will not leave". Established, it is inevitable that the relationship will fade from generation to generation, but it is still difficult to accept.
Most of the post-50s and post-60s were born in families with many children. When they were young, the family conditions were generally difficult. To overcome the difficulties in life, they could not do without the "hands-on" of relatives.
Brothers and sisters depend on each other for most of their lives, and kinship is very precious to them.
Hang Suhong said that kinship is a very important relationship network in Chinese society, and it is an important social and emotional resource for a person.
It has a warm side, such as the sense of belonging and the realization of the meaning of life, and the support of relatives in terms of resources and emotions; but it also has a cruel side, such as comparisons between families and interest disputes, and so on.
"This kind of complex emotion towards kinship should be experienced by most Chinese people more or less in the past hundred years. In the current Chinese society, the emotional and resource support established through this kind of kinship network is also very powerful. vitality." Hang Suhong said.
However, with the changes of the times and the development of society, traditional kinship is facing an impact.
Since the reform and opening up, China's urbanization has advanced rapidly, and its economic development has changed rapidly, bringing about huge changes in the social structure.
According to official data, the urbanization rate of my country's residents will climb to 64.27% in 2021, nearly double that of 1999.
Correspondingly, China has experienced an unprecedented wave of population mobility.
According to the results of the seventh national census, my country's floating population is nearly 376 million, which is almost equivalent to the total population of the entire United States.
In 1982, the number was only 6.52 million, and in 2010 it was only 221 million.
In this highly compressed modernization process, people leave the land they are familiar with, gradually break away from their original social relations, and gradually distance themselves from their extended family.
In the process of this flow, the refinement of the social division of labor, the expansion of public education, the establishment and improvement of the social welfare system, etc., undoubtedly accelerated this flow.
"This flow of historical formation has led to differentiation in residence, occupation, education, lifestyle, values, family changes, and the trivialization of daily life, making many people and their few brothers Sisters are separated, so that their next generation lacks close contact and frequent contact with relatives since childhood." Hu Xiaowu said.
With the development of the entire country's economy, the family's material wealth has also accumulated to a certain extent, and many mutual assistance needs such as borrowing money and helping workers can also find corresponding services in the market.
This greatly enhances the ability of modern families to independently resist risks, and also reduces their dependence on the network of relatives. Although it reduces the burden of owed and repaid favors, it also reduces the stickiness and resilience of relatives.
In addition, as the out-and-out "Internet natives", the younger generation "live on the Internet". This individualized lifestyle greatly fills their various needs and free time, and their kinship is further marginalized.
The young people of the new generation, in their own new world, establish new interpersonal rules, draw new boundaries, and form new intimate units by themselves.
"Contemporary Chinese, especially young people, on the one hand, find it increasingly difficult to obtain the warmth and support of kinship; on the other hand, in the current globalized and networked society, the new way of life makes It is becoming more and more difficult to bear the relatively cruel side of kinship." Hang Suhong said.
3. Rational view of family affection
Some scholars pointed out that the weakening of kinship relations is a product of industrial civilization. This kind of change does not matter whether it is good or bad, but it is just to adapt to the requirements of their respective times.
In this regard, Hu Xiaowu agreed: "This is just a social phenomenon, not a social problem, and does not have negative functions or unstable factors. It is just the result of a considerable social development."
Hang Suhong pointed out that although the indifference of family affection is prominent among young people, it is not just a problem of young people, it reflects the overall situation of society.
If the parents have already lacked the appropriate daily communication and interaction between relatives to a large extent, then children who grow up in this environment will naturally not have special emotions for relatives.
"Think about the environment in which these children grew up: with the increase of social mobility, the residence of relatives is separated, and the contact and interaction between relatives is less and less; ), and the children who have lived in various learning and training and virtual networks since childhood." Hang Suhong said.
Hang Suhong further pointed out that the indifference of kinship has its social causes, but this indifference itself is a subjective problem, which is caused by contemporary individuals who only pay attention to themselves and lack understanding of others.
The narrowness, crampedness and pressure of the living environment of young people in modern society make it easier for them to fall into a preconceived opinion.
She believes that during the holidays, it is an opportunity to get to know each other up close. Although there are many differences in age and living environment between them, which will bring some discomfort and incomprehension in communication, for young people It is also an important learning to observe these uncomfortable and incomprehensible places, and to try to understand and respect others in real society.
Should we worry about this?
"The basic structure of Chinese society and culture has not undergone substantial changes, the main structure of family ethics and kinship has not undergone qualitative changes, and the logic of Chinese behavior has not changed." They return to the network of kinship relations, and manage and maintain kinship relations like their parents did.
4. Reawaken Kinship
In Hu Xiaowu's social survey, there is another conclusion that is intriguing.
For the respondents aged 40 to 50, more than 80% of them are in frequent contact with their relatives, which is just the opposite of the statistical results of the post-90s and post-00s; and compared with the post-90s, post-00s have a more "light" view of relatives—— Among the respondents under the age of 18, 63.15% of the respondents have "basically no contact" with their relatives.
Hu Xiaowu explained that this has something to do with the changes in the structure of the kinship relationship between generations in the family.
To put it simply, most of the post-80s were born in rural areas, and there are brothers and sisters, especially the parents born in the 60s basically live in big families, so their first-generation relatives and second-generation cousins still have memories of living together. Objectively, it will increase the link degree of blood relatives.
Most of the young people born in the 90s or some of the post-00s are only children themselves. Many of their parents born in the early 1970s have one or two brothers and sisters, so they still have second-generation cousins, and some parents have a good relationship. Families will bring closer second-generation relatives to the children born in the 90s and 00s.
But when it comes to the post-2005 and post-10 generations born after 2005, many urbanites don’t even have second-generation cousins, and most of their relatives are third-generation relatives.
Therefore, they themselves belong to the intergenerational group with weak kinship.
"Among the young generation who objectively lack a generation of kinship, the concept of 'kinship' has been lacking since childhood, so how can there be closeness and separation?" Hu Xiaowu said.
In a nutshell, the younger the generation, the higher the probability of neglecting family relationships. This is not only an objective necessity of the changes of the times and social lifestyles, but also an objective consequence determined by the changes in the family relationship structure between generations.
The past childbearing policy accelerated the shrinkage of extended families and the rise of nuclear families, and also magnified the impact on traditional kinship.
But it's not without a turnaround.
Hu Xiaowu believes that as China's urbanization slows down and economic development reaches a higher level, new changes may appear in the family structure.
Especially when the post-90s and post-00s get married and become parents, they will actually expand their kinship network.
The change of identity allows them to better understand and empathize with the "relative relationship" of their parents, and continue to use it as their own emotional and resource support network.
Thereby kinship is united and awakened.
He believes that in the future, the phenomenon of weakening family affection will improve.
Hang Suhong also believes that in the future, as the number of people returning to their hometowns for employment increases, the kinship network will develop to a certain extent.
But she also believes that if young people have developed too much on the road of "self", the "awakening" of kinship because of reality may be painful.
As a parent of a post-10 generation, Hu Xiaowu is very vigilant about possible changes in his family.
In order to reduce the potential for the relationship between cousins to fade, he and his younger sister's family agreed to try their best to cross the physical distance of 700 kilometers, so that the two children could get together for some time during winter vacation and summer vacation, and communicate and interact remotely as much as possible. It may bring their psychological distance closer and help the two children maintain the emotional bond between each other.
There are not many people who have awakened confidence and are willing to put in the effort.
Mr. Zhang, who lives in Beijing, shared that he will also travel to a certain destination with his cousin’s family living in Hangzhou. The children of the two families are about the same age, and creating conditions for the children to be familiar with, so that they will not be confused because they live in Hangzhou. Completely unfamiliar in different cities.
"Now that the economic conditions of each family are better, there is less need for relatives to support each other, but it is also because of the improvement of the economic situation that we have the conditions to create more opportunities for contact and communication for the next generation." He said.
(Our reporter Wang Dan)