8/9/2026
Yesterday I wrote about an article that I read on comparing two generations in China. When comparing parents and their children, we have to remember that these two generations were shaped by radically different historical circumstances in China. Their psychological differences cannot be understood without first looking at the worlds in which they grew up.
The first generation—roughly those born in the 1950s and 1960s— came of age during one of the most turbulent periods in modern Chinese history. Many were children or teenagers during the Cultural Revolution and young adults when Reform and Opening began in 1978.
They experienced scarcity and disrupted education during childhood, political uncertainty during the Cultural Revolution, and then the restoration of the college entrance examination. They witnessed the beginning of Reform and Opening and subsequently experienced the rapid expansion of private enterprise, foreign investment, international trade, and urbanization.
Most importantly, they lived through an extraordinary period of upward mobility. China was changing rapidly, and their own lives changed with it.
They were therefore not simply survivors of hardship. They were also beneficiaries—and, more importantly, participants—in China's economic transformation. Many entered the workforce during the early years of Reform and Opening and became the people who actually built much of the new economy. They worked in factories, started businesses, entered newly emerging professions, moved from the countryside to cities, and built families and careers in an economy that was transforming before their eyes.
They were, in many ways, the backbone of China's rebuilding and economic transformation.
Their children, roughly those born in the 1980s and 1990s, grew up in a very different China. This was the generation heavily influenced by the one-child policy and raised in a country that was already becoming dramatically more prosperous.
They are 独生子女 (dú shēng zǐ nǚ), only child in the family. Their childhood experience was almost the opposite of that of their parents:
One child surrounded by two parents and often four grandparents.
Much greater material security.
Enormous parental investment in education.
Intense academic competition.
Access to technology, entertainment, and consumer goods that their parents could scarcely have imagined.
Little or no direct experience of the scarcity their parents had known.
Many parents who had sacrificed enormously and therefore placed tremendous expectations on their only child.
Many of these children are now in their thirties and confronting adulthood in an economic environment very different from the one their parents encountered at the same age.
There is an interesting reversal here.
The parents grew up in a world where life was difficult, but the future seemed to be opening up. Their experience taught them a simple and powerful lesson: if I work hard, my life can become better than my parents' life.
Their children grew up in a world where life was much more comfortable with abundant materials, but the future became increasingly competitive and uncertain. They inherited the prosperity their parents had worked so hard to create, but they also inherited a society in which expectations had risen enormously.
And here lies an important irony.
The very parents who developed extraordinary resilience by enduring hardship often devoted themselves to protecting their children from the hardships that had once helped make them resilient.
They had known hunger, failure, uncertainty, and deprivation. Naturally, they wanted their children to experience none of those things. They worked hard to give their only child the best of everything, and a more comfortable life than they themselves had known.
That was an understandable—and often loving—response to their own childhoods.
But it also raises an important question:
What happens when parents who learned to endure failure spend their lives making sure their only child does not have to experience failure?
A child who is protected from every difficulty may be protected from some suffering, but may also have fewer opportunities to discover what he or she is capable of.
To be sure, I don't mean to say that every only child is fragile, selfish, or incapable of responsibility. Nor does it mean that every parent overprotected their child. Human beings are far too diverse for such sweeping conclusions.
Of course, these differences in upbringing do not, by themselves, explain why some young people today struggle with depression, why some have difficulty handling setbacks, or why others become remarkably capable and resilient. Nor do they prove that one generation is stronger than the other.
Now I'm interested in knowing if one generation's strengths may unintentionally contribute to some of the next generation's vulnerabilities and how we can prevent it.
More on it later.
