China's One Child Policy

In China there is an ancient tradition called 'sitting the month-' or did you see this NPR segment, too? Sitting the month involves the new mother staying home for a full month after the birth of her child, wearing pajamas, avoiding drafts, and enduring other restrictions on what she can eat, drink, and do. The richer moms are able to go from hospital to specially staffed apartment complex to sit out their month. Here the specially trained staff prepares and serves the foods required for sitting out the month, they sponge bathe the new mothers (who aren't allowed to bathe), and help them learn to take care of their babies- if you call it care to provide:

24-hour-a-day supervision from trained nurses; a nutritionist; doctors on call to diagnose every baby sniffle; and someone ensuring that the rules are followed at all times — not just by the new mother but by her extended family too.

"My mum thinks it's a pity that she can't come in every day to cuddle my baby," Wu says, enumerating the reasons she's been given for this by the center's experts. "It's not very good for the development of newborn baby's bones to be cuddled too much. We don't want him being held too much as he might become too dependent. I pretty much only hold him when I nurse him."

And I'm going to go all cultural imperialist and say that I do not consider this care, and it's difficult to imagine what is going to happen when these only children grow up.

The girls and I saw it or heard this NPR program when it aired, and the same two statements struck us all. The one above, and this one:

Some argue that this new generation of Chinese mothers — who, as part of the generation of only children under the one-child policy, have not grown up with younger brothers or sisters — need help more than ever before.


"They're kids themselves," says the center's pediatrician, Zhang Jianna. "They don't really know how to look after kids. So they have even more demands. They're just happy that someone knows what to do."


A nurse is even teaching Wu Lili how to sing lullabies to little Momo, though halfway through the new mom gives up. At this postpartum center, paid nurses show the new mothers what to do, rather than their own mothers or aunties.

The more I think about this, the more the mind just petrefies at the prospect.

One child.  No siblings  No cousins. No friends with younger siblings.  No friends with older, married siblings who have a baby or two.
A nation of only children- I'm not one of those who thinks an only child is a terrible thing.  Only children have advantages kids with many siblings don't have, and large families have advantages only children do not have.  I don't even think it's a question that only children can grow up well adjusted, happy, productive. Of course they can.  But what a nation of only children cannot do is grow up with much experience around babies.  There will be a few exceptions here and there, but this vast social experiment has got to be changing the culture in ways that nobody thought through or realized.

The more I think of it, the more problems I see- of course, there are people here and now who grow up without much experience with babies until they have one  of their own.  But what they also have is at least a few friends with more experience, family members they can ask.  Here we have an entire nation of people who have grown up with a peer group of fellow only children.
They don't know their lullabyes, their baby games, their finger plays and nursery rhymes, how to diaper a baby, what to do with a baby, so these things are automatically transferred over to the experts.  Can you imagine a culture where trained nurses are the ones who know the lullabyes?  This is a country where the most basic of cultural transmissions, the things we take for granted- the method of transmission used for centuries and centuries- it's been cut and cauterized.

And then, of course, there's the gender gap, because forced to choose only one child, the Chinese generally prefer to make that one child a boy, so there are about 120 boys for every 100 girls, and teh age gap, whereby now about two workers will have to support one elderly citizen.  What does that mean for the future of China?  Will we see telethons begging for food for the starving elderly of China?

This is an incredibly valuable read that considers just those questions. It covers many aspects of China's one child policy and the harm it has done and continues to do. Here's just one excerpt:

And then there were the forced abortions and sterilizations. On this score, the Chinese government had help from the West. In 1979, as China prepared to roll out One-Child, the government signed an agreement with the United Nations Population Fund, which pledged $50 million to help control births—a euphemism that in practice meant groups of government workers rounding up pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions. The U.N.’s presence opened the door for other Western organizations, including the Ford Foundation and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which poured resources into China in an effort to kill babies. These groups were not unaware of what was happening. The IPPF’s Benjamin Viel wrote admiringly, “Persuasion and motivation [are] very effective in a society in which social sanctions can be applied against those who fail to cooperate in the construction of the socialist state.”

We can point with horror at what China has done to herself, but it turns out, we have been complicit. How many of PPF dollars came from tax dollars confiscated from citizens and redistributed to an organization that helped commit this brutal attack on female babies?