MCLC: Parent meddling makes for unmerry marriages

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Parent meddling makes for unmerry marriages
Source: China Real Time, WSJ (2/11/15)
Parent Meddling Makes for Unmerry Marriages in China: Report
By Laurie Burkitt
A vendor lights a rose with a torch for customers at a flower market in Kunming, Yunnan province. Reuters
Father knows best? Not when it comes to matchmaking in China.
When Chinese parents play matchmaker and pick spouses for their children, the resulting marriages are likely to be unhappy, according to newly published research from the World Bank. “Parental matchmaking is robustly correlated with lower marital harmony,” said a World Bank research paper titled “Love, Money, and Old Age Support: Does Parental Matchmaking Matter?”
The reason for the unmerry marriages is that parents put their own needs for elderly care ahead of love, say researchers. Lacking hearty social security, Mom and Dad worry about the post-retirement years and how they’ll be cared for, so they look for wealthy mates for their children who will provide financial security. They also seek submissive mates who will happily tend to chores, boosting household productivity, the report said.
Researchers surveyed 3,400 rural couples and 3,800 urban couples in seven provinces across China in 1991. While the data might be old, said Colin Xu, one of the authors, parental influence remains important in Chinese culture. Traditionally arranged marriages in which children have no say in their marital fate are no longer as prevalent in current-day China, but Mr. Xu said Chinese parents still tend to be heavy-handed in the match-making process. In parks all across China, mothers and fathers meet for a marital NFL draft,swapping statistics regarding their children’s education, assets, salary and profession.
Many marriages are certainly based on personal choice, without the help of mom and pop, but sociologists say it’s likely that parental guidance is far more common in China than in the U.S. Anecdotally, children across China feel the pressure of rising healthcare costs and the lack of investment vehicles, so some end up acquiescing to economics-driven marriages.
That said, even in the U.S., some have recently queried whether parents should be more involved in directing what goes on at the altar.
While the World Bank’s research doesn’t find many positive effects for couples whose parents play matchmaker, the paper doesn’t point to parental matchmaking as a cause for China’s climbing divorce rates. The number of couples who filed for divorce in 2013 climbed 12.8% to 3.5 million according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs. That compares to around 458,000 in 1985, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Still, regardless of a marriage’s level of happiness, many Chinese parents do succeed in their economic goals in more ways than one. The research said parent-patched marriages yield in higher income for couples in urban areas.
Mr. Xu said that the World Bank hopes the research will “be relevant for us to understand countries such as India, which also has a strong tradition of parent-arranged marriages.” He added that findings likely have implications in South Korea and other Asian countries, where parental authority is strong. “Whether they might have predictive power there would be each person’s call, but I do think it might be relevant,” Mr. Xu said.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 11, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20150211/508c9d5d/attachment.html>