A new look at the old "little emperor": Developmental changes in the personality of only children in China

Social Behavior and Personality, 2001 by Zhang, Yuching, Kohnstamm, Geldolph A, Cheung, Ping Chung, Lau, Sing

In order to study the perception of Chinese parents of their children, audio-taped free descriptions of children's personality characteristics were obtained from 401 Chinese parents living in Beijing and Fuzhou. The free descriptions by parents showed that, as children's age increased, different categories of descriptors were typically used. Only for children at ages 35 did negative descriptors associated with the so-called "little emperor" stereotype prevail in parents' free descriptions. On the other hand, the proportion of negative descriptors in the Conscientiousness category increased with children's age. This was an indication of the persisting importance given by Chinese parents to characteristics associated with school performance, effort, and diligence. The results showed that there were no signs of a spoiling attitude in Chinese parents. The high proportions of negative descriptions given by Chinese parents should be interpreted as an expression of great concern for the future of their children, rather than as a sign of hostility towards their children.

In order to reduce the rate of population growth, the People's Republic of China has - since 1979 - put into effect the one-child policy, which prescribes that each new family should have only one child. Since the enforcement of this policy, problems concerning only children have become hit topics in the field of child development in China. An only child in China is frequently regarded as "a little emperor" or "a little sun", namely, a spoiled child. In the West, some researchers believe that an only child often grows up to be a self-centered individual (see Hall, 1987). Neal (1927) even declared that being an only child was a disease in itself.

Some studies in the early 1980s showed that Chinese only children were selfish, unsociable, maladjusted, conceited, fragile and cowardly (see Wang, 1984), and that they made demands for immediate gratification of their wishes, displayed disrespect for elders, and had outbursts of temper (see Tao & Chiu, 1985). Although most of the studies were based on crude subjective observations or simple tests in kindergartens as mentioned by Wu (1996), these descriptions of characteristics (little emperor stereotype) in all kinds of media had a great influence on people's perceptions of Chinese only children. In research (Jiao, Ji & Jing, 1986) with 4-to-10 year old children from the urban and rural areas of Beijing, psychologists of the Chinese Academy of Science's Institute of Psychology discovered that only children obtained low scores in cooperation and peer prestige, and that they were perceived by their peers as highly egoistic. Only children were more likely than were children with siblings to refuse another child's request for assistance, were less modest, less helpful in group activities,tended to do whatever they liked and did not voluntarily share their toys with others.

However, some other studies reported very positive characteristics of Chinese only children. For example, the study by Poston and Yu (1986) of teachers' evaluations of 1069 Chinese children ranging in age from 3 to 9 years old indicated that, as compared with children with siblings, only children scored higher in both mathematics and verbal achievement, and were rated as more cooperative and less hostile. Also, in Falbo's research (Falbo et al., 1989), only children in China obtained highly positive evaluations.

In view of these contradictory results, it is misleading to state that only children in mainland China have been spoiled by their parents because the latter have treated the former as "little emperors". The authors attempted to resolve the contradiction by employing, in the present study, a finer grouping of children with a wider range in age. Based on parents' free descriptions of their children, they examined to what extent the characteristics of the "little emperor" stereotype would emerge from different age groups of children.

METHOD

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 401 Chinese parents (215 mothers and 186 fathers) in Beijing and Fuzhou participated in this study and provided free descriptions of the personality characteristics of 231 children (55.6% boys and 44.4% girls). The majority (93%) of these children were only children. The children's ages ranged from 3 to 14 years. There were four age groups, namely, 3-5 years, 6-8 years, 9-11 years and 12-14 years, and the number of children in each of these four groups were 40, 117,112 and 132 respectively. The age groups were constructed based on the unified classification method in a cross-cultural study of seven countries (see Kohnstamm, Halverson, Mervielde, & Havill, 1998). The SES of the families in this study was estimated on the basis of the occupation and education of the parents, and the proportions of the low, the medium and the high SES families were 12%, 45%, and 43% respectively.

PROCEDURE

Twelve second-year students of the Education Department of Fujian Normal University and six third-year students and four graduate students of the Education Department of Beijing Normal University conducted the interviews with parents. First of all, they acquired the names of the families and the addresses (and phone numbers) of the children from the kindergartens and primary schools near the campuses of Fujian Normal University and Beijing Normal University. Then they contacted these parents by telephone to ask for consent to interview them. After receiving a short training by the first author of this article, they went to interview the parents in the children's homes. In the interview, the main question to parents was: "Can you tell me what you think the typical characteristics of your child are?"