Saturday, April 20, 2013

Jieun Choi/Smaller family/Tues 9:00

            In family reunion, I sometimes get very embarrassed, especially when I can't figure out how to call my relatives. The reason is simple: it's all small family now and I barely meet my relatives. Until my parent's generation, almost every family was a big family, so it was ordinary for them to live and meet with so many relatives. However, different from them, my generation doesn't even have a lot of chances to meet close relatives other than their own family. Then why a smaller family is preferred nowadays? It's because of the industrialization, and higher expenditure on a child.

            Long time ago, Korea was an agricultural society. Almost everybody made living by farming which required an enormous amount of labor. Therefore, it was necessary for people to have a big family, especially with many men in the family, to maintain a workforce without hiring somebody outside their family. However, since 1970s and 80s, Korea went through an industrialization based on incredible speed, and the demand for the farming sharply decreased. Consequently, the need for a bigger family disappeared, and it became normal to have one or two kids.

            Moreover, recently the higher cost for raising children is another reason for the preference on small family. Most of Korean parents put a large emphasis on higher educations, and regard graduation of university as the bottom line of one's educational background. Due to these kinds of social climate, parents spend a lot of money on their children's education. According to some studies, the cost to raise a child in Korea, assuming they go to university, goes up to 400 million won. 400 million won is definitely a huge amount of money, which becomes an enormous burden to parents. As a result, people tend to raise a few children and have smaller family.

            In personal opinion, I think the shift to a smaller family enabled to make sticky bond between each family members. Since there are less family members to take care, people can concentrate even more on each family member than they usually do. For instance, they can have much deeper conversation about certain topics and spend much more quality time then they used to do. It offers people a great chance to get closer to each other when it comes to smaller family.

            To sum up, there are few causes that shifted Korea's family structure from bigger family to smaller family. The shift is resulted from the industrialization in late 1900's and higher expenditure on child raising. The smaller family, however, brought a chance to make affiliation between family members. 

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