Whether to send their children to school or to marry a daughter-in-law is a dilemma for parents in their hometown
Author: Zhang Xuelin | China Rural Governance Research Center, Wuhan University
1. High bride price
300,000!
Not a penny less!
As soon as I arrived home, I heard about this eye-popping wedding bride price that had been passed down by word of mouth. I still remember that when I went home during the Spring Festival last year, the marriage bride price was generally 150,000, and it doubled in a year, and it has risen to 300,000 this year. And this is not just the high price that one wants, but the general market in the local marriage market this year.
My hometown is located in northern Anhui on the North China Plain, and the family in the west of the village has twin sons, and the eldest son got married this year. When "passing the book" before marriage, the woman asked for a bride price of 300,000 yuan, and no money was missing. This does not include the cost of the initial meeting gift, engagement, buying three golds and taking wedding photos, which are all gifts for the woman. In addition, since the two parties meet and agree to make a marriage contract, every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, the Spring Festival and the pre-marriage "book" set date, the man goes to the woman's parents' house to visit, and he must load a cart full of gifts. When the neighbors talk about it, they all say that the road looks good every year during the Mid-Autumn Festival on August 15. In the past, it was a whole tricycle, but this year it has also been turned from a tricycle into a pickup truck, which has to carry 20 cases of liquor, 20 cases of beer, 20 cases of drinks, 16 big red roosters, a sheep, three pork, and so on. In addition, another building with a courtyard will be built, which will cost at least more than 200,000 yuan. If you don't build a house at home, you need to buy a house in the city, at least four or five hundred thousand, and the cost will be higher.
Neighbors said that the first son of the family would give a bride price of 300,000 yuan for marrying a daughter-in-law, and the second son would marry a daughter-in-law only more, not less, and the bride price would continue to rise next year. The rise of the bride price in the marriage market is set off by the competition of families with two sons, and the family of one son follows the situation. During the blind date introduction, the woman was reluctant to give the opportunity to meet as soon as she heard that the man's family had two sons. I remember going home during the Spring Festival last year, a family in the east of the village has two sons, the eldest son is 22 years old, the younger son is 18 years old, the eldest son has failed many blind dates, and he is about to miss the marriage age, which is really sad. When I came back this year, I heard that I still didn't find a suitable one locally, and finally compromised by his eldest sister to introduce a Henan Shangqiu, who had already held a wedding, and finally married a daughter-in-law in time.
After the formation of the national marriage market and labor market, there is a general loss of female resources in the rural areas of the central and western regions, compared with the urban and developed rural areas in the east, located in the depression of marriage, and my hometown has a strong preference for boys, the sex ratio is seriously unbalanced, and has a strong concept of local marriage, that is, I am unwilling to marry a foreign daughter-in-law, unless I really can't marry a local daughter-in-law, I will consider going to other places. This will lead to the high scarcity of local female resources in the local marriage market, and the high competition between men of marriageable age will naturally form women's asking price and marriage dominance in the marriage market. For families with two sons, when it comes to whether the parents are partial after marriage and the brothers divide the family and property, in order to prevent possible losses in the future, the woman asks for a high bride price before marriage, transfers the family property in advance and overdraws the man's parents, in the local dialect, "first to the hand insurance".
Regarding the amount of the bride price, there is also a bargaining game process between the two families, and generally the poorer the man's family or the more brothers, the weaker he is in the marriage market, and the less capital he has to negotiate, the more he needs to accept the woman's asking price. Otherwise, the woman will not agree, and the woman is not worried about marrying locally, and there are a wide range of opportunities and options to choose from. Although there is no sibling competition in a son's family, it must also follow the situation, and the bride price that the woman wants cannot be less than the mainstream price of the year, otherwise it may be discussed that the girl is not good and worthless, and the bride price is less and there is no face. Therefore, under the premise of structural imbalance in the marriage market, the bride price will only rise, and even if the government introduces policy initiatives to change customs and reduce the bride price, it will have little effect.
2. Forced early marriage
For the average agricultural area in the Midwest, the high cost of marriage puts enormous pressure on middle-aged parents. Compared with the atomized areas such as the Lianghu Plain, Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan and Zhejiang, parents only bear limited responsibility for their offspring, that is, the responsibility of parents is mainly to raise their offspring, while the marital responsibility is mainly for the offspring themselves, and parents only have auxiliary responsibility. The parents of the North China Plain have unlimited responsibilities for their offspring, not only to give birth to sons and raise their offspring to adulthood, but also to complete the life task of marrying a daughter-in-law for their sons and bringing grandchildren, that is, marrying a daughter-in-law for their sons is the marriage responsibility that parents need to bear, otherwise the son will not be able to marry a daughter-in-law and become a single, and the public opinion in the village is pointing to the incompetence of the parents, rather than to the individual offspring. Then, under the situation of marriage squeeze on the rural areas in the central and western regions after the formation of the national marriage market, the high competition of the local marriage market for female resources will further aggravate and amplify the marriage anxiety of parents.
On the one hand, parents need to go out to work hard to earn money, save money for their sons' daughters-in-law, build a house or buy a house in the city, accumulate marital capital, and release favorable marriage signals in the marriage market; on the other hand, they need to take the initiative to organize blind dates for their sons, increase the chances of blind dates, and improve the success rate of marriage. Due to the lack of local labor market and work opportunities in the rural areas of the central and western regions, it is necessary to go to the developed areas in the east to work, so only the Spring Festival in a year will young people go home, so in fact, there is not much time for a blind date in a year, only a short period of the Spring Festival can go on a blind date, in fact, the number of blind dates in a year is not much.
In order to increase the success rate of marriage, the only way to do this is to go on a blind date for your son as soon as possible. If you start organizing matchmaking for your son from the age of seventeen or eighteen, you will have four or five years to choose between the time you are twenty-one or twelve. And if you start late, the time and space available for blind dates will become smaller, and if you meet your son who is a little picky, it will be easy to reach the age of twenty-three or four. In the local area, once a man has not married a daughter-in-law at the age of twenty-three or four, he has missed the golden period of mate selection, and it is more difficult to marry a good local girl, one is because there are basically no girls of such an age in the local area who have not yet married, and the other is that the young ones are not willing to find older ones, because there are many men of the same age to choose from.
If you can't marry your son and hold your grandson, your parents' life tasks will not be completed. Even if they can't marry a good local girl, parents still have to find a way to marry their son a daughter-in-law, and there are three common strategies: first, lower the requirements locally, marry someone with a little physical or intellectual disability, or marry a second time; second, agree to marry a daughter-in-law from a foreign place, and the parents generally do not agree to find a daughter-in-law from other places during the golden mate selection period; and third, "buy" a daughter-in-law for their son from Yunnan, Guichuan and other places. Compared with the son's fight against the single, this is a helpless sub-optimal choice, but compared to Ming Media marrying a good local girl, after all, it is a feeling of inferiority, because this is the last retreat without ability in the eyes of others.
In order to prevent unexpected "tragedy", parents need to start preparing as early as possible, if their son did not do well in junior high school and could not be admitted to high school, after graduating from junior high school, he began to stare at the matchmaker at the age of fifteen or sixteen. And the surrounding relatives and neighbors are together for a short time, and the parents will always remind the parents that it is almost time to worry about their children. Therefore, now parents begin to organize blind dates for their children when they are seventeen or eighteen years old, saying daughters-in-law for their sons and in-laws for their daughters.
Due to the rising tide of marriage, the man's parents are forced to tend to "flash marriage", shortening the period from engagement to marriage. Because the longer the period of falling in love between engagement and marriage, the higher the marriage cost paid by the man's family, and important festivals such as the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival every year are the moments when the man needs to go to the woman's parents' house to perform. From a full tricycle in the past, to a pickup truck full of gifts now. Therefore, after the engagement, the man's parents will tend to hold the wedding early and marry home, while the woman's family tends not to be in a hurry and let the "two children" talk before the wedding. Most of the final compromises are one year, that is, the blind date and engagement during the Spring Festival this year, and the woman agrees to get married during the Spring Festival next year. Therefore, this will lead to the widespread phenomenon of illegal early marriage, and it is not uncommon for young people who have not yet reached the legal age of marriage to get married at the age of seventeen or eighteen.
3. Indulgent dropouts
With parents suffering from great marital anxiety, we can further understand the ambivalence of local parents about the education of their children. When I go home during the Spring Festival, I often hear my mother say that there are many relatives and neighbors whose children go out to work before graduating from junior high school, and there are many who belong to only one semester away, but they are unwilling to go to school. Every time I hear this, I feel very heartache and anger, since I was in primary school in the 90s, the vast majority of my peers have graduated from junior high school, nearly 20 years have passed, why is the concept of education still so backward, and even regressive, or so little attention to education?
Whenever this happens, local parents will feel very aggrieved, and they often say two sentences almost in unison: "As long as the child is willing to go to school, I will support him even if I sell iron." "But he didn't want to go to school anymore, and when I asked him why, he said that he had a headache when he went to school and read. "It seems that parents attach great importance to and support their children's education, but in essence, parents completely shift the responsibility of education to their children who are not yet capable of independent behavior. In fact, this is also to give legitimacy and moral support to local parents' self-protection and short-term rational action strategies, or to provide a collective exemption mechanism for parents' irresponsible and short-sighted behavior in the education of their children.
We can roughly divide the intergenerational responsibility of parents to their offspring into three dimensions: parenting responsibility, education responsibility and marital responsibility, of which parenting responsibility is the foundation, that is, the safe and healthy raising of offspring to adulthood, which is also the same in the country and even the world, is the basic responsibility of parents can not be shirked, and for marriage responsibility and education responsibility in different parts of the country there are regional differences. For parents in the North China Plain, the marriage responsibility of the father to the child is a "hard task", that is, a life task that has to be completed. If the offspring can be admitted to the university to achieve the carp jumping dragon gate, it is natural to be able to shine on the lintel, so the parents will say "as long as the child is willing to go to school, it is to smash the pot and sell iron to support him to go to school", but if the offspring is not willing to go to school, it is no big deal, as long as he can marry a daughter-in-law and hold his grandson, his life task will be completed, and he can smile Jiuquan.
In the context of marital responsibility becoming the "hard task" of parents and the huge marital anxiety caused by the current marital squeeze, parents have a deep unconscious self-protection and short-term rational action strategy choice in order to release the pressure. Parents face four possible outcomes in the process of raising their offspring to adulthood and fulfilling life tasks:
First, the optimal result is that the children are admitted to key universities, just like my family, my younger brother and I have been admitted to 985 key universities, and we can expect to achieve class mobility and social status improvement through education, and then we will no longer participate in the rule evaluation system in the village, and marriage will no longer be the main problem that parents worry about;
Second, the academic performance is not top-notch enough, even if you go to school, you can't be admitted to a key university, in the local language, you can only go to a "bad university", in today's era of university expansion, choosing a "bad university" for parents, is a high investment, high risk and low return thing. Because going to a bad university means a high investment (at least four years of tuition + living expenses), and there is also an opportunity cost (if you don't go to college, not only do you not spend money, but you can also go out to work to earn money). At the same time, in the modern society where academic qualifications are depreciated, a student who graduated from an ordinary university is not competitive, his income is naturally not high, and he has not even had his parents to do hard physical work to earn money. At the same time, due to the age of the offspring as they go to university, they may miss out on the best choice period in the local marriage market, which is also a high-risk thing for parents. For the offspring to go to a "bad university", not only the investment is high, the return cycle is long, the return is low, but also faces the high risk of missing the best marriage age. This is also the internal logic of the popular "useless reading theory" in the countryside.
Third, the grades are not good, after graduating from junior high school, he began to go out to work, and at the same time, his parents also began to worry about marrying a daughter-in-law for their son, completing the "hard task" of marital responsibility for their children, striving to hold their grandchildren as soon as possible, and repeating the life story of their fathers. Although parents often feel sad when they talk about their children's lack of study and unwillingness to study, this is just to vent their emotions in front of relatives and neighbors and find a step for themselves.
Fourth, the worst result is that the offspring not only have poor academic performance, do not receive a good education, but also do not marry a daughter-in-law and become a bachelor. This means that the "hard task" of the father to marry the daughter-in-law and hold the grandson for the child is not completed, and the parents will die blindly, which is definitely the result that the father cannot bear and try to avoid. The best results for the offspring to be admitted to key universities are hard to come by, and a very small number of lucky families will not become the objects of imitation and competition by the majority of the mainstream in the village. The second option requires the courage and long-term vision of the parents, but for conservative smallholder farmers, they are most afraid of risks, especially under the conditions of economic differentiation and high competition in village society, which further restricts the vast majority of smallholder families from breaking through their own limitations and looking to the future.
Then, the result of the third sub-optimal and safe insurance has become the rational choice of most parents, although there is a regret that they cannot realize the hope that their son will become a Chan, but it avoids the risk that the offspring may be "extinct", and completes the "hard task" of life, and has an explanation for the ancestors, to themselves, and to the public opinion of the village. As for the children who dropped out of school before graduating from junior high school and went out to work, although they were helpless, they didn't think it was a serious matter in their hearts, because if they didn't go to school, they could start to worry about marrying a daughter-in-law for him. In order to reduce the responsibility of parents in education, in the village public opinion, parents dumped the pot on their offspring, that is, emphasized that the offspring dropped out of school because the child did not want to go to school, and as soon as he went to school, he had a headache. Although this is indeed the reason given when the children are reluctant to go to school, the parents have given up their guardianship responsibilities and left a minor to play life at will.
Fourth, it is necessary to cultivate the ability of offspring to participate in market competition
Parents in the North China Plain regard the marital responsibilities of their offspring as a "hard task" and the educational responsibilities as a "soft task", which we see as a type. After the formation of a unified national marriage market and a national labor market, the marriage responsibility of the parents to the offspring is essentially to help the offspring improve the ability to realize family reproduction, and the educational responsibility of the parents to the offspring is to help the offspring improve the ability to participate in the competition of market opportunities. On the basis of the basic responsibility of parents to complete the upbringing of their offspring, we can further divide them into four types according to the two dimensions of parents' marital responsibility and educational responsibility for their offspring:
I. Category is "double strong type", that is, the marriage responsibility and educational responsibility of the offspring are regarded as the "hard task" of the parent, and the intergenerational resources are passed downward, which is not only conducive to improving the ability of the offspring to participate in market competition, but also conducive to the smooth realization of family reproduction by the offspring, which is undoubtedly the most beneficial to the offspring.
Type II. Regard the responsibility for the education of the offspring as the "hard task" of the parent and the responsibility of marriage as the "soft task", such parents focus on cultivating the ability of the offspring to participate in the competition of market opportunities, while the marriage and family reproduction of the offspring are mainly the offspring's own affairs. This type is the family concept in modern society, where one generation is only in charge of one generation, and the traditional concept of blood inheritance and inheritance is already very weak. This kind of research in Zhejiang Shangyu and Jianghan Plain and other places as typical representatives, the parents of these two rural areas attach great importance to the education of their children, and buy a house in the city mainly so that the children can receive better educational resources in the city, and the younger generation has a high proportion of higher education at or above the college level, and the post-80s generation in Shangyu Village, Zhejiang Province basically went to college.
Type III. is the northern village that regards the responsibility for marriage to the offspring as the "hard task" of the parents, and the responsibility for education as the "soft task" of the parents, and the author's hometown of the North China Plain is a typical example of this type. In this type, parents pay attention to the traditional values of blood traditions, so the primary focus is to help their children marry daughters-in-law and hold grandchildren, so as to achieve the goal of family reproduction.
IV. Category is the "double weak type", that is, the marital responsibility and educational responsibility of the offspring are regarded as the "soft task" of the parent, and the intergenerational responsibility is limited, and the parent mainly raises the offspring as an adult and completes the basic parenting responsibility. This type is mainly represented by Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hubei Zigui Badong and other plateau and mountainous areas. In this type, whether it is the ability of the offspring to participate in market competition or the ability to realize family reproduction, it is up to the offspring to complete it themselves.
It should be noted here that after a unified national labor market and marriage market have been formed, once the parents cultivate the ability of their offspring to participate in market competition by attaching importance to educational investment, then educational and cultural capital can be transformed into economic capital and marital capital, which will potentially improve the ability to compete in marriage in the national marriage market, and even if they do not need the help of their parents, the offspring can complete the marital responsibilities and realize family reproduction on their own. In such a situation, we can compare the overall competitiveness of the above four regional types, and there is no doubt that the competitiveness of the I. double-strong region is the strongest, followed by II., III., and IV. Class I and Class II pay attention to the education of offspring, pay attention to cultivating the ability of offspring to participate in the competition of market opportunities, and the offspring mainly rely on the quality of labor force to participate in the competition of market opportunities, so the degree of modernization and urbanization of the family under this type is relatively high.
However, the III and IV categories do not pay enough attention to the education of the offspring, and the offspring are not strong in the competitiveness of market opportunities, and are in a dilemma of being squeezed in the national labor market and the marriage market. However, due to the strong marital responsibility of the parents for the offspring under type III, it is possible to help the offspring realize the task of marriage and family reproduction by deeply mobilizing the allocation of family labor resources, relying on the number of family labor force to participate in the competition of market opportunities, and by working together among family generations. Therefore, there are relatively few singles under the III. type area. Under the squeeze of the labor market and the marriage market, and without the strong intergenerational responsibility support of the parents, the offspring under category IV often become "thrown out" in a highly competitive environment, and fall into the dilemma of family reproduction such as singles, running marriages, and divorces.
When family resources are abundant, parents generally do not face the problem of choosing between marriage and education investment for their offspring. Often, when family resources are limited and scarce, parents are caught in a dilemma of choice. However, under the background of the formation of the national labor market and the marriage market, parents in rural society need to change their vision from the competition within the village to the national competition, that is, the field of competition has changed from the village in the past to the whole country, which requires parents to complete the basic parenting responsibility for the offspring at the same time, but also pay attention to the education of the offspring, and concentrate family resources to cultivate the ability of the offspring to participate in market competition, which is the fundamental way to realize the upward mobility of social classes. Even if you go to a "bad university", in the short term, it is a matter of high investment, high risk, and low return, but the income can not only look at the immediate wage income, and there are still many hidden benefits and long-term returns for the improvement of labor ability and quality, including the vision of the offspring, the value-added space of the labor force, and the quality of the offspring of the offspring. All in all, even if the offspring goes to a "bad university", he basically completes the carp jumping over the dragon gate, and also walks out of the village and into the city, his own offspring can no longer be farmers, and will no longer repeat the life of his ancestors in the era of "giving birth to babies and herding sheep" in the village.