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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

after moving to china any preconceptions i had about western people being considerate of children (and parents) went out the window. chinese not only tolerate children, but they allow them to get away with anything, almost to a fault even. i have never once seen anyone complain about children. they bring them to work and they care when someone needs help in levels that a western parent would consider intrusive. and any disruption they simply ignore. after experiencing that, asking a parent to step outside to me now feels rather rude and inconsiderate.

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Do you think this is how it's always been in China or do you think this is a response to how their attitudes towards children have changed?

The US tends to have a very individualistic outlook compared to many other societies, so I think differences should be expected to differ from culture to culture. In the US, it would make me very uncomfortable to have keep my child in a movie theater making noises if I felt like it was inhibiting on someone else's enjoyment of a movie, for instance.

i believe it has been like that all the time, because in the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up. (this also reflects in the attitude of future grandparents who to this day push their children to get married and have kids. sometimes in extreme ways)

>the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up

This has been the case for most agrarian economies, including the US in the past so I’m not sure that’s a good discriminator.

that's a fair point. i haven't read anything about how children were treated in china in the past. i am more familiar with stories about treatment of children in historical europe. in short, in europe children were seen as a necessary nuisance (someone mentioned cattle)

but from that i want to draw a few observations: i think attitude towards children in europe either has improved or it hasn't changed. if it hasn't changed, then why should it have changed in china? but even if it has improved, on one hand it is still way behind china by comparison, but on the other hand we stopped depending on direct children a few decades earlier than china, so if there was a parallel development then china would have to be a few decades behind europe with their changing attitude towards children. that being not the case suggests that there was no change in attitude at all, or at least not one prompted by a modern pension system and therefore the chinese attitude towards children could not be a new thing.

Even if they have changed, I seriously doubt you can distill something complex like societal interactions and norms down to a simple one-variable model like the introduction of pensions.

right. another reason why i am skeptical that any change happened.

Society norms definitely shift. My point is that that change is generally the result of a highly dynamic and complicated process, rather than pointing to a single cause.

This has not matched my experience in seeing children being raised in other countries in Asia, though I have not spent significant time in China itself, particularly around parents and their children, so I can't comment there. I will say that does not match the behavior I have seen of first generation or even second generation Chinese immigrants in America, however.

My anecdotal experience, primarily driven by my time in Japan as well as living in a place that has a very large Asian immigrant population is that they are as strict when it becomes to the behavior of their children as any Westerner, and often moreso. When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave than when I see similar behavior out of kids from western parents at the Safeway

Perhaps this holds true in China itself, but I don't believe the distinction is purely East vs. West.

When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave

i don't want to claim that my experience is the norm, but this sentence in particular reminded me that my distinct first impression in china was like "boy they do let their kids here get away with anything"

add to that the reputation of the single child policy creating "little emperors" because of how parents raise their child.

but again, this is just my experience. it may well possible that this is a small minority, and that i just never saw parents corralling their children because they possibly were already effective at raising them to be well behaved.

it is also worth noting that i observed a much higher tolerance at people behaving out of the norm. (but then it is also a much rarer occurrence and it is also not considered polite to confront people)

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