Symbiosis And Interaction——The Relationship Between Children And Parents In The Tang Dynasty

The children’s figure didn’t lack in the ancient literature of China, however, most of the related records were from adults, which mixed with people’s views on children at that time. With the development of society, this kind of understanding was changing. By comparing the historical materials in different periods, we can found that the understanding of children had gradually matured and refined since Qin Dynasty, and legal, medicine, painting and education opened the exclusive space for it. To the Tang Dynasty, the view of children had become more and more clear. As a result, people paid more attention to the children increasingly, with the deepening understanding.Parents’ intervention to children in the Tang Dynasty can be roughly divided into two parts which named raising and teaching. From ten months’ pregnancy to postpartum care, parents were investing a lot of effort to take care of their babies, and the custom of supplicating for a son and child-rearing prevailed in the Tang Dynasty, which reflects the parents’ uneasiness and expectations to the children. The healthy growth of the children was the first step of the children’s life course. In order to make the children have a better development in the future, parents also needed to give them the moral and intellectual skills of etiquette education to let them become the ideal of the adults’ hearts. In addition, the education of different classes and sex also had an obvious difference.As the children’s closest relatives, the parents’ ideology had a directly influence on the future of the children. However, the expectations and the reality are not consistent, children have their own independent consciousness. They grow up under the influence of their parents, but also changed their parents. Moreover, there is some difference between the ideal construction of parent-child relationship and the reality, The traditional concept of "a kind mother and a severe father"is not absolute, and we can see another concept of "a kind father and a severe mother" through the poetry and the epitaph materials. Even in a family the parents will be confrontated because of the different positions of the confrontation, and the confrontation between the father honor and the motherhood will indirectly affect the child’s future. Furthermore, the influence of children to the parents is from bottom to up, and the relationship not a one-way instructing, but interdependent symbiosis. At last, the difference between the birth and raising makes the interaction more complex and changeable between the children and the parents in the Tang Dynasty.