Hello everyone, I'm Daddy~
I would like to ask you first: Which one do you think is happier in old age, the parents of only children or parents with many children?
For this issue, everyone must have their own opinions, and the wise people have their opinions.
Different life experiences will inevitably lead to different conclusions.
However, from the perspective of traditional culture, "more children and more blessings" is a beautiful expectation of life engraved in our bones, and has always been regarded as the truth by many people.
In the long historical process, having more children can not only meet the needs of family-style group development, but also provide more guarantee for "providing for the elderly".
However, with the development of the times, the rules of survival of the past no longer seem to apply.
Nowadays, more and more people continue to lament that the elderly in single-child families may be happier in their old age.
What's going on here?
Let's analyze it with you today from the perspective of psychology, and the reasons are really realistic.
01. Single-child families have a higher concentration of parent-child affection
In families with many children, one of the most common topics we discuss is:
How do you level a bowl of water?
But in fact, when we are really in it, we will suddenly understand that no matter how much we treat everyone equally, there will always be a time when we will lose sight of one or the other.
That is to say, in a multi-child family, whether it is time, energy, emotional investment, etc., at a certain moment, it will inevitably be tilted.
To put it more colloquially, what children get is the "love" that their parents seem to distribute fairly, and this kind of love is difficult to reach 100% average.
To explain it in chemical terms: one more child is equivalent to the original parent-child emotional concentration, one more "dilution".
But this phenomenon does not appear in single-child families.
Because a child in the family is often the existence of the stars holding the moon and collecting thousands of pets.
Whether it is the elders or the parents, the love given to the child is complete.
The love, nurturing, care, and companionship that children feel from their parents, the lack of comparison, competition, and the whole process of growth is absorbed wholeheartedly.
In this way, the emotional concentration between the two parties is bound to be higher and the relationship is closer.
Psychologist Albert has put forward a theory called "social penetration theory".
It refers to the fact that as the relationship deepens, the emotional communication between individuals gradually expands from superficial information to deeper private information.
In single-child families, because there is only one focus, energy and time will not be scattered, which fully creates the conditions and environment for in-depth communication between parents and children.
The emotional stickiness of both parties is higher, the sense of dependence is stronger, and when the elderly are old, the communication and contacts between parents and children will be closer. Naturally, I feel happier.
02. In families with many children, family resources are scattered
In families with many children, we often see such a phenomenon:
When it comes to pension, children are always calculating, with obvious utilitarian colors.
For example, a story I saw on the Internet before.
An old lady has seven or eight children, but in her old age, none of them are willing to do their filial piety in front of her.
Not only that, but there is one who counts one and stares directly at the old man's house.
Later, someone gave the old lady an idea, saying that there was an ancestral treasure in the family, and whoever had the most filial piety would pass on this treasure to whom.
When the wind dispersed, sure enough, the children flocked to it and immediately changed their faces.
Many people don't understand why it has become difficult to provide for the elderly when there are more children?
In fact, this has a lot to do with the dispersion of family resources.
Sociologist Guildon's theory of family resource allocation states that the resources in the family, including emotion, time, and money, are limited.
In families with many children, these resources are more likely to be dispersed and skewed.
To put it simply, if each child does not have access to complete resources, it is easy to have the idea of "sharing or tilting the responsibility of providing for the elderly" psychologically.
But in fact, the sharing of pension responsibilities is the same as that of a multi-child family, where parents want to level a bowl of water, which is simply unachievable.
In the end, it will evolve into a state of complaining, arguing, noisy, and even picking on a bad one.
However, the one-child family perfectly circumvents this problem, neither brothers and sisters can rely on, nor will they be haunted by the unfair distribution of resources, so they can only rely on themselves to bring more attention and warmth to the elderly in their later years.
03. An only child, more responsible
In the "Theory of Generation and Stagnation", there is a sentence like this:
In middle age, people often gain a sense of accomplishment and psychological satisfaction by taking care of the next generation or supporting their parents.
That is to say, when everyone reaches a certain age, they have the psychological impetus of "crows feeding back".
However, in families with many children, this impetus will lose its effect due to the sharing of pension responsibilities.
In single-child families, however, there is no one to share in the burden, but this impetus can be infinitely magnified.
Of course, on the surface, we can also understand that the sense of responsibility of an only child will be stronger.
The source of this "strong sense of responsibility" is, on the one hand, their experience of the comprehensive gentleness and delicacy of "you raise me young", and on the other hand, the tenacity and determination after knowing that no one can help.
Because the only child understands that there is absolute uniqueness between himself and his parents.
Therefore, generally speaking, at the level of old-age care, only children are more active, and because they have established a good intimate relationship with their parents, they can also meet more emotional and spiritual needs in their parents' later years at the level of emotional expression.
In fact, whether a person's life can be guaranteed in his old age is not the number of children at all.
Rather, it depends on whether a strong emotional connection has been established in the process of getting along with the child.
In other words, even in a family with many children, as long as the children grow up, the parents have built a harmonious, equal, happy, effective companionship and frequent communication parent-child relationship with them.
Then one day, the child will also return all this to his parents.