From Intimacy To Alienation:Changes In Contemporary Rural Family Intergenerational Relationships

As the cell of the society, family is the basic unite and organizational form which ’closely related to each of us lives. The family intergenerational relation is one of the important indexes to reflect whether the interaction of family members is benign or not, it is also the main content of family relationship. Self-sufficient peasant economy of small scale is the solid foundation of traditional Chinese social structure where the long-term accumulated farming experience is necessary to the cultivation on the single land resource, meanwhile, due to the single channels of the spread of the knowledge and the guideline that father guides son result in the custom that the younger one should obey the older in the traditional family, so traditional social formation was close balance between family intergenerational relations. Compared with the traditional society, the time background of modern Chinese society great changes have taken place, especially in the countryside, there are huge differences between intergenerational family, let to communication estrangement from generation to generation. Balance of inter-generational relations gradually being broken, parental relationship with the children gradually alienated.L village in gansu province in the process of social transformation gradually become the old village, generational fracture phenomenon is more obvious, and Intergenerational alienation is the norm. It is based on the perspective of the theory of exchange, compared with traditional close the intergenerational relationship, intergenerational alienation is a state of imbalance of intergenerational interaction, but we must realize that the alienation of intergenerational relations is not caused by the poor communication among family members but the product of all kinds of factors integrated under the macro background of the social transformation. So starting from the perspective of rationalism, established on the basis of rational action two generations of inter-generational alienation is a new balance of intergenerational interaction.This paper conducts the discussion on this topic based on the perspective of the family modernization theory and exchange theory as well as a large number of references and interviews of the situation of L village, Gansu Province. The paper mainly talks about the topic from the following five parts:The first part is the introduction, introducing the themes of the research, briefly recalling the major references at home about the research of intergenerational relations and then making a succinct explanation for the core concepts and methods of the research of the paper; The second part briefly describes the terrain features, the production activities and current situation of population of L village and also explains the selection of the scope of the investigation objects; The third part expounds more intimate intergenerational relations during the traditional period and the alienation of this relations under the background of social transformation from three dimensions including power, economy and emotion; The fourth part mainly analyses the reasons of the alienation of intergenerational relations; The five part is about the presented extension of the intergenerational alienation, and the purpose is to show that the current social and cultural background have very difference from the traditional period, so for the alienation of intergenerational relations analysis is not only based on the perspective of exchange theory, but should stand in the perspective of rationalism; The last part is the summary part, is to review and summarize the full text of a simple.