Is the one-child policy spoiling China’s children?
by Michael Cook
Research confirms all the cliches about “little emperors”, the children of parents who were forced to stop at one.
“Kids these days are spoiled rotten,” grumbles the director of a Beijing kindergarten. “They have no social skills. They expect instant gratification. They’re attended to hand and foot by adults so protective that if the child as much as stumbles, the whole family will curse the ground.”
This sounds like the weary complaint of anyone over 60 about anyone under 20. But in China, it has a particular target: the little emperors, the cosseted offspring of couples who have been told by their government that they can only have one child. There are about 150 million families in China with only one child, more than a third of all families.
The one-child policy was introduced in 1979 to stop China’s population from growing unsustainably. In principle, couples are limited to one child. Exceptions are made for couples whose first child is disabled, for ethnic minorities, and for farming families and for some other family types. But family-planning regulations are enforced with ruthless zeal in the cities.
China’s birth rate fell rapidly after the one-child policy was introduced, even though demographers increasingly insist that it would have fallen anyway. Whatever the reason, the fertility rate in the giant cities of Beijing and Shanghai is about 0.7 – far below the national figure of about 1.5 and far, far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.
A figure of 0.7 children per mother means that there are almost no families with more than one child in Beijing and Shanghai.
But is the little emperor syndrome real – or is it just a mass media cliché eagerly repeated by China’s critics?
This is the question which an Australian academic and three Chinese colleagues examined in an article in the prestigious journal Science earlier this year. To their surprise, their research confirmed the cliché. “We document that China’s One-Child Policy… has produced significantly less trusting, less trustworthy, more risk-averse, less competitive, more pessimistic, and less conscientious individuals,” they wrote.
It’s one thing to complain about the younger generation in a coffee break, but quite another to prove it. How did Lisa Cameron, of the University of Melbourne, and her colleagues do it?
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