Research On The Intergenerational Ambivalence Of Rural Grandparents

As a social fact existing in specific cultural and historical situations,has been paid more attention to with the trend of family core and miniaturization in the modern process.Unlike grandparents in Europe and the United States,who take on the responsibility of intergenerational upbringing because of their children’s death and imprisonment,and other East Asian countries,such as Japan and South Korea,are subject to the traditional gender division of labor and lack of kinship networks.Most of the discussion on intergenerational upbringing focuses on the explanation of its causes and the influence on grandchildren and grandparents,but there are few studies on the choice of intergenerational upbringing form and its dynamic mechanism,especially the lack of micro-level intergenerational consultation,interactive process perspective.Based on the theory of intergenerational ambivalence intention,this paper investigates the present situation of intergenerational upbringing in Z villages in southern Anhui Province and finds that the intergenerational events are the direct factors that cause intergenerational ambivalence intention.The underlying reason lies in the influence of structural tension between traditional concepts and social systems on individual life.On the one hand,social transformation and family-oriented concept contribute to intergenerational upbringing behavior.On the other hand,due to the lack of urban household registration system and rural social security,parental rearing intention is bound to be hindered,and in the course of the game of these two structural tensions,the resulting intergenerational conflict stimulates the contradictory intention of parents,That is,the confusion,swing and uncertain psychological feelings of their own tending behavior and its value and significance,and on this basis,different tending strategies to alleviate the contradictory intention have been formed.Due to the differences of individual family status,parental ideology and life experience,the coping strategies of parents’ contradictory intentions through intergenerational consultation are also different :(1)some parents still go into cities to participate in intergenerational upbringing activities with high intensity,showing a unified intergenerational model,high degree of intergenerational consistency,the traditional family upbringing model is still maintained,and the intergenerational contradictory intention is presented in a hidden and non-public way.(2)Some parents choose not to enter the city to participate in the care,which shows an innovative intergenerational relationship model,which seeks both the innovation of the family structure and the interdependence of each other,and tries to alleviate ambivalences and tensions by bringing up grandchildren in rural areas or by bringing up children alone after consultation.(3)There are also some family relationships that eventually tend to divide,presenting an intergenerational pattern of segregation,in which parents refuse to participate in intergenerational upbringing,but such phenomena are rare in Z villages and exist only in the sociological sense of the "ideal type ".The choice of intergenerational upbringing mode depends on the process of intergenerational negotiation.The intergenerational ambivalence negotiation usually takes "downward tilt" as the criterion,that is,giving priority to the development needs of small families and taking into account the interests of parents to a certain extent.On this basis,the concern about the rural old-age problem,the public opinion evaluation mechanism of acquaintance society,and the rational measurement of economic benefits all affect and shape the pattern arrangement of different generations.