▲Xu Yaling's family (Nong Jian, Liang Shuyi/Photo)
To be born, or not to be born? In 2021, with the landing of the three-child birth policy, "several children" has become a choice that every small family will face. Two mothers, Yang Qiqi and Xu Yaling, made different choices during the year, but for similar reasons: the best for their children.
This article was first published in the New Year's Special Issue of Southern Weekend
Wen | Southern Weekend reporter Gao Yichen liu Yixian
Southern Weekend intern Zhang Weiting
Responsible editor| Tan Chang
After a busy day until 9 p.m. closes, Yang Qiqi has the opportunity to sit down and rest after 90. She took off her apron and mask, revealing two red halos on her cheeks, squinting and smiling.
In July 2021, she and her husband left their hometown of Yongdeng County, Gansu Province, and opened a noodle shop in Lanzhou, more than 100 kilometers away. They want to work hard for two years, take their 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter over, and get a better education in Lanzhou. It is very hard to do catering, Yang Qiqi in order to the taste of noodles, a day to knead more than ten pounds of dough, rice points to give customers noodles bowls, from eight o'clock in the morning to more than nine o'clock in the evening.
For the Lanzhou store, Yang Qiqi had a miscarriage operation in June 2021 and gave up her three children. This decision was made by the younger two and did not tell the elders of the family. Yang Qiqi said that the arrival of a child should take into account many factors: whether there is anyone to help take care of it, how his physical condition is, whether he can give the child a better education, etc., the heart is tangled and uncomfortable.
In Panzhihua City, Sichuan, 1500 kilometers from Lanzhou, 33-year-old Xu Yaling is full of expectations for the arrival of her second child. She went through a complicated obstetric examination, nervous about every physical indicator, and carefully conceived the child. In October 2021, she ushered in a healthy little treasure. Panzhihua is the first city in the country to issue childcare subsidies to families with two or three children, and Xu Yaling was fortunate to receive a childcare subsidy of 500 yuan per person per month.
The three-child policy will be implemented in 2021. Whether to be born or not, to have a few, is a choice that every small family will face. After much deliberation, the two mothers made the choice they considered best for their children.
1
"Uninvited guest"
Yang Qiqi's family (Nong Jian, Liang Shuyi/Photo)
Yang Qiqi's noodle shop is not easy to find, hidden in a wet market. The door face is small, two meters wide. The restaurant and the back kitchen are connected together, and the size is only more than ten square meters. The small shop has five tables compactly arranged, selling only pasta, the couple is busy behind the counter, and business has been very good in recent days, and the fat sausage noodles are particularly popular. Too busy to come, they called their father from Yongdeng to help.
The husband has been learning to cook for seven or eight years, the craft is there, plus the couple is willing to use fresh ingredients, the store's brine pig's trotters, pig skin, fat intestines are very popular, many old customers are worried.
Yang Qiqi's husband originally opened a noodle stall in Yongdeng and made a night market, from 3 p.m. to 3 or 4 a.m. The consumption habits of the two places are different, and the people in Yongdeng County generally get together and order 3 pounds of meat on the table; the people of Lanzhou pay attention to economic affordability, and twenty or thirty yuan should be able to eat noodles, meat, and vegetables, with a complete set. Yang Qiqi and her husband patiently pondered and constantly improved before launching the hot-selling fat sausage noodles.
Yang Qiqi originally studied graphic design and knew nothing about catering. But she is willing to learn everything, first of all, she designs her own menus, signboards, and decorations. In order to make the dishes good, I began to learn to knead myself and dough, at first I could only knead five pounds at a time, and then I improved a little bit and could knead fifteen pounds.
Before the epidemic, Yang Qiqi and her husband planned to start a business in Lanzhou, buy a house and settle down, and take their children to Lanzhou to attend primary school. In early June 2021, the couple transferred Yongdeng's shop and planned to act as planned, but an "uninvited guest" came - Yang Qiqi was pregnant.
Welcoming three children when her career was booming, Yang Qiqi was quite hesitant. Since the birth of two children, the mother-in-law has been helping at home, and adding another one, can she take care of it? In addition, the children's education expenditure is also very large, lanzhou kindergarten costs more than 7,000 yuan a semester, and the tuition fee for two children a year is 30,000 yuan. Both husband and wife have to earn money to work, so where is the time to stop and have children?
2
"I want to have a child to grow up with Dabao"
At the time when Yang Qiqi was struggling with life and not having a life, Xu Yaling was ready to welcome her second child. She was pregnant with a child in 2020, but unfortunately miscarried at three months, and this time she is even more nervous about having a second child.
Xu Yaling has an older sister who has had a good relationship since childhood. The most memorable thing is that when my sister went to college, her parents always prepared the tuition and living expenses for my sister the night before, and my sister secretly divided some of them and gave Xu Yaling pocket money. After graduating from university, Xu Yaling stayed in Panzhihua to form a new family, while her sister returned to her hometown of Guangyuan City. The sisters often talked on the phone, "I like to discuss everything with my sister."
A few years ago, Xu Yaling's mother fell ill, and her sister took care of her at home. At this time, the benefits of having brothers and sisters are also revealed, and they can support each other. Xu Yaling's husband is an only child, and he is very envious of the lively big family, "We have always thought that there is a child who can grow up with Dabao."
It's not easy to conceive a child. At four months of pregnancy, Xu Yaling was worried about a small problem in the child's ultrasound examination: Xiao Bao's left ventricle had a strong echo of a few tenths.
"What exactly causes his left ventricle to have a strong echo?" Is the situation serious? On the night of the noninvasive DNA test, Xu Yaling could not sleep; the night before the report, she did not sleep all night. The next morning she rushed to the hospital and saw that the report of Down's screening was all low risk, which put her mind at ease.
Pregnant with the second child, Xu Yaling felt very anxious at all times. During the examination, she would stare at the doctor's expression, afraid that the doctor would frown. She works in the hospital and checks her child's fetal heart rate with the department's fetal heart monitor after work. One hand operates the monitor, the other hand holds the phone to record, "I just think there has never been any sound, better than that fetal heart (heartbeat sound)." ”
3
After becoming a mother
Yang Qiqi said that she used to be naïve in her thinking that having children was particularly natural and simple - this year I heard who married whom, and in a year or two I heard that they had children, it was very common. "[Children] may be born like us, eating on time every day and going to bed on time."
The real situation is that newborn children have irregular schedules, wake up four or five times at night, and wake up to feed and change diapers. Staying up late is a common occurrence. The two children were slightly older, the eldest just could walk, the smaller could climb, and one person couldn't stare at a pair of eyes. Since the birth of her daughter, she has been helping her mother-in-law with her children. Yang Qiqi also had no job for three years.
Both mothers want to give their children a high-quality education and companionship.
Yang Qiqi said that after becoming a mother, she actually realized the feeling of "taking the child in her mouth and afraid of melting", such as trying to buy the best milk powder, drinking packaged milk after two years old; when she went out near the water source, she was nervous about their safety. "Dolls today are not like we were then. At that time, we were staying in the township, what do you know? ”
Yang Qiqi has her own educational philosophy, she believes that today's children can only contact the wider world from mobile phones, and parents cannot decide the future for their children like the older generation. What she can do is provide as many opportunities as possible to nurture her children's own hobbies and give them enough room to think.
In the three years of Working as a night market in Yongdeng, Yang Qiqi could not see her children for a week. When the couple returned, the children were already asleep; in the morning the children went out to kindergarten, and they were still sleeping; when the children were out of school, they went out again. For a while, children were more familiar with grandma than mom. Yang Qiqi felt quite guilty about this. After arriving in Lanzhou, the store closed, and it was the video time between her and her children.
On this day, the 5-year-old son learned to tell the story "Little Mouse Who Loves to Brag" from the short video platform. The mother-in-law took a video of him and sent it to Yang Qiqi to see. "He has good language expression ability and good memory", Yang Qiqi commented while watching, she had intentionally exercised these abilities of children.
Xu Yaling also enrolled her 7-year-old son in various interest classes: language arts, abacus, taekwondo, swimming, and only two finally persisted.
During the maternity leave, Xu Yaling insisted on getting up at 6:30 every morning and accompanying her eldest son to read for an hour early. The two of them ate breakfast together, Xu Yaling sent him to school, and then came back to take the young son from her mother-in-law.
The eldest son needs to go to the swimming pool every night to train for two hours. These days, when Dabao swims, Xu Yaling stays at home to take care of Erbao and has no time to see him. Dabao made a request to her, "Mom, I want you to come and see me."
Xu Yaling felt that time was tight, and there were many things in the family, and she was too busy to do it. But she still promised to come down, "After taking maternity leave, there will be no time to accompany him." Xu Yaling has been watching by the pool, from the time the child began to swim until he finished swimming. "Money is easy to solve, but both people are office workers, and the lack of company for children is what we have been worried about." Xu Yaling always sighed, the child grew up very fast, and the height of the blink of an eye was already one meter and four meters.
4
"The small family welcomed him and the extended family welcomed him"
On July 28, 2021, Panzhihua held a press conference, in order to attract talents and retain talents, the "Sixteen Policies and Measures on Promoting the Gathering of Human Resources" will be implemented, and the birth subsidy is one of them: for The Panzhihua household registration family that has a second child or more according to the policy, a monthly childcare subsidy of 500 yuan per child will be issued until the child is 3 years old, and the real money and silver will solve the child's "milk powder money".
As soon as the news came out, many friends forwarded the news to Xu Yaling. The formalities were handled by the husband, the information was handed over, and it was completed quickly. As of October 31, 2021, 5,347 people had settled in Panzhihua, 392 families had declared childcare subsidies, and the natural growth rate of Panzhihua's population had reached 2.62%.
Linze County, Zhangye City, Gansu Province, issued a policy in September 2021 to give birth allowances and childcare subsidies to families with two or three children, and families with three children can receive 10,000 yuan in childcare subsidies every year until the child is 3 years old. In addition, the local government also gave housing subsidies for the first time, and the permanent families with household registration in Linze who have two or three children will receive a subsidy of 40,000 yuan if they buy a house in the county.
Yang Qiqi's mother's family is in Zhangye, and she has also heard that her classmates and friends have received subsidies for childbirth. But for her, having three children, whether there is anyone to bring with her is the key issue. After giving birth to her second child, Yang Qiqi's mother-in-law never went out to work again and has been helping to take care of the child at home. "Having a child is not your business alone, it is your family's business." Yang Qiqi concluded.
Xu Yaling is a nurse in charge of the Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Department at Panzhihua Central Hospital, and her husband works in an ironworks, and both of them need to "work the night shift". If there is no one in the family to help with the children, she said, it is a "big problem and I dare not ask for it."
Southern Weekend reporters once interviewed Yang Juhua, a professor at the School of Ethnology and Sociology of the Central University for Nationalities, on the issue of three-child fertility support, and she believes that fertility support should be global and need to see all aspects of it: time support, economic support, service support, employment support, etc. For example, parents should be encouraged to take vacations, children's education fees should be reduced in taxes, and childcare services for children under 3 years old should be further improved.
On July 20, 2021, the Decision of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Optimizing Fertility Policies to Promote long-term balanced development of the population was officially announced, and major decisions were made to implement the three-child birth policy and supporting measures. On August 20, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress voted to adopt a decision to amend the Population and Family Planning Law, which stipulates that the state shall adopt financial, taxation, insurance, education, housing, employment and other support measures to reduce the burden of family fertility, parenting and education.
Soon, more than 20 provinces revised the population and family planning regulations, extended maternity leave, and added parental leave that both parents could take, ranging from 5 to 15 days.
This time to give birth to the second child, Xu Yaling said that she received a lot of help from colleagues. After four months of pregnancy, she no longer has to work the night shift and can take 150 days of maternity leave after giving birth. Xu Yaling said that 500 yuan a month is really not much for raising children, "but they give us subsidies to make (us) feel spiritually that [the birth of the child] is welcome and very happy."
They planned to save all the subsidies belonging to Erbao and tell him after he understood things: "Our small family welcomes him, and the big family (the state and society) also welcomes him in particular." ”
Everyone else is watching:
2022 Southern Weekend New Year Special 丨 Choice
In 2021, we are crossing the threshold of the era of great changes in the past century, with difficult steps but firm eyes. From the state to the individual, the choice is the proposition of the year. We have seen that in the face of the haze of the epidemic, Chinese businessmen have ventured to travel; in the face of the monstrous flood, the hotel owner has opened the door; under the "double reduction" change of track, New Oriental has broken its arm to survive; the "three-child" policy boots have landed, and different families have made the decision to live or not to have children; after 14 years of separation, the abducted son returned to his biological parents; the "fairy tale king" Zheng Yuanjie chose to stop publication and raise the anti-infringement banner; the full-time mother embarked on the road of examination; the "old tourist" became a professional red bride...
Every choice is a farewell to the past, a longing for a new life. Even if there is only a glimmer of light in the future, even if Tarzan collapses in front of him, he must grit his teeth and fight hard. Every choice may seem small, but it is a strong response of each individual to the times.
These choices constitute the social picture of China this year. In the face of great changes, open a new situation in the crisis, cultivate new opportunities in the crisis, and find certainty in the uncertainty. Southern Weekend's 2022 New Year special issue starts from here, with the theme of "Choice", to record the story of this year that should not be forgotten.