Attitude Of The Young People Of Traditional Filial Piety, And Their Parent-child Relationship

Filial piety prescribes how children should behave toward their parents, living or dead, as well as toward their ancestors. Filial piety is one of the paramount guiding ethics governing social behavior in Chinese societies. It has been particularly emphasized by Confucian scholars throughout Chinese history as regulating interpersonal, especially intergenerational relationships among Chinese people. The study of filial piety in Chinese societies is a discipline dominated by historians, philologists and philosophers. Little interest in studying filial piety came from the perspective of behavioral sciences, particularly from that of psychology, until the 1970s, when empirical studies began to appear in the psychological literature. But in the mainland of our country, there are still no psychological studies focusing on this aspect. In view of this, the present study combined quantitative and qualitative measures to explore the adolescents' attitudes toward filial piety in the mainland of our country from the psychological perspective.The present study includes two parts. In the first part, data were collected via the FPS and the parent-adolescent conflict questionnaire and the parent-adolescent cohesion questionnaire administered to a sample of 891 adolescents of grade 9, 10, 11 and 12 from the urban and rural areas of Shandong Province, in an effort to investigate the adolescents' attitudes toward filial piety and the effect of the attitudes on the parent-adolescent relationship. In the second part, we further explored the adolescents' endorsement of filial piety and suitability of the filial piety in modern society.The main findings from the present study are as follows:1.There was significant difference in Adolescents' attitudes toward the four domains of filial piety.2.Adolescents with siblings held significantly stronger values regarding oppressing themselves and showing obedience to parents, and ensuring the continuity of family line and bringing honor to the family name, and serving and supportingparents than their peers as only one children. The adolescents of grade 9 reported higher agreements to the aspects of ensuring the continuity of family line and bringing honor to the family name, and oppressing himself and showing obedience to parents than those of the other three grades. In general, there was no significant gender difference in the adolescents' attitudes toward filial piety, but male adolescents possessed higher values regarding ensuring the continuity of family line and bringing honor to the family name, and reverence and mourning parents than those of female adolescents. Female adolescents held higher values regarding oppressing themselves and showing obedience to parents than that of male adolescents. In the two domains of oppressing themselves and showing obedience to parents, and ensuring the continuity of family line and bringing honor to the family name, rural adolescents held stronger agreement than urban adolescents.3.Adolescents possessed stronger attitudes toward serving and supporting parents than that of their parents. But in the other three domains parents' attitudes were more positive than those of adolescents.4.Rural adolescents had greater cohesion and lower conflict intensity with their parents than those of urban adolescents. Female adolescents had more cohesion and lower conflict intensity with their parents than male adolescents. The intensity of conflict with their parents of adolescents from the grade 9 was stronger than that of the other three grades, and the frequency of conflict of adolescents from grade 11 was lower than the other three grades. Adolescents as only children had stronger conflict intensity than that of their peers with siblings.5.Except the aspect of ensuring the continuity of the family line and bringing honor to the family name, significant positive correlation was found between the other three aspects and adolescent-parent cohesion, but significant negative correlation was found between the other three aspects and conflict in...