A kid's eye view of family life in China.

Are Chinese families as geographically separated as American families?

How many generations live under one roof?

How many Chinese kids have guitars or minibikes?

How many Chinese kids have to go to school five days a week?

Is school free? Is school required?

What sort of vegetables are grown in Chinese home gardens?

Hmmm - what is this, parent homework? How is your child supposed to know the answer to this? Is he supposed to be computer-abled already?
Did they already explain the differences, whatever they are, in class time?
Is he supposed to go to the library and read up?

It's a parent/student project. We're supposed to help them find something and they are supposed to illustrate it.

I'm trying to find some information on family vegetable gardens in China without a lot of luck. I'm going to keep looking -- I like that idea.

I do think I read that in China kid's go to school six days a week.

Maybe because our neighborhood is heavily populated with Asian families that the things I read don't sound so different from what Mo knows. There are four Chinese kids in his class as well as two Japanese kids. There are several multi-generation families on our block.

It really is kind of tough assignment!

In the countryside, when woman gets married, she always leave home to live with the parents of the man. Men always stay with their mother.

There's a Chinese poster named Raymond Chang who speaks very good English and seems to like to chat, maybe you could PM him about this link.

Are American families allowed to have more than one child?

Do all Chinese families have cars?

Can a Chinese family in a village buy grapes out of season?

Indoor plumbing? Paved floors? Computer access.

I Googled China Rural Life and found:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-01/15/content_783186.htm

Interesting, isn't it, that they can get TV but not newspapers.

Articles like that really make you think. Do you suppose there are rural areas of America like that. Appalachia? It is almost hard to believe.

Mo is not very talented with drawing so I'm wandering back to red eggs and long noodle birthdays. He could draw a noodle and a cake.

Thank you all for your help!

Some of the "BREAKFAST" threads had snippetts of information about chinese breakfast.

I almost called this thread "Chinese Breakfast" but I couldn't bring myself to do it!

We went with the noodle/cake variable.

All the Chinese kids in his class will probably think he's a complete dork.

chopsticks vs. forks?

But that's not very descriptive of family life.

Maybe the point of this assignment was to realize how much the cultures have in common.

I'm still freaking re parent homework.

Have children start to describe what they know, and help them do it by whatever means, including crayons.

This proposed problem is a set up for the kid with most interested mom or dad, best computer mom or dad, class differentiation, yadda yadda. One doesn't need to access the full google set up in kindergarten - or, oh, god, do they?

They could just talk with each other, especially given their natural differences.

Damn, do I alway need to be so pissy? No. But this time I really don't like it.

I'm feeling creepy on this. Can't they have the children bring in aspects of their backgounds?


I see orchestration happening way beyond natural sharing - and I'm much more interested in promoting the natural - which does have potential for more richness. <osso explodes>

In the meantime, kiddo with most keen mom or dad with concommittent computer skills gets kiddy on top. What sort of lesson is this?

OK, I speak from bias. I lucked into a nice catholic grammar school and a not quite so nice (hiss) catholic high school, a catholic college (one year) and a state university (in various multiples).

Nobody ever helped me with my homework, ever, ever, or ever. I wince at all who waltz - and I'll admit that's quite a bias.

but to get mom or dad or guardian or (no one) to help you in kindergarten, what the hell is this, to make it part of the assignment???????????

You can tell I'm aggravated by the number of question marks..

Osso--

I forget what the Fifth Grade Learning Unit was, but the extra-credit project was "Build a Model of a Bridge".

For once the blue collar families with fully equipped workshops in their basements had the middle class parents roaring with high displeasure.

I think Mo's teacher is trying to get kids' families involved in school and in learning. A great many parents feel that the teacher is in charge for the school day and when the school day is over, learning stops.

Homework? Teacher's problem. Plagerism? Teacher's problem. Enduring curiosity? Teacher's problem.

Trust me on this: my helping Mo with his homework will in no way leap him to the top of his class.

They did send home a little fact sheet and kids could choose on of those things to draw. I suppose it is my fault for wanting to come up with something different -- and something Mo could confidently illustrate.

I really don't have a problem with parent/child homework. It is really too early for me to detect a pattern but it seems like we get a few of these type assigments right before conferences/report cards. It probably helps the teacher gauge parental involvement.

Mo's music class requires much more involvement than his kindergarten class.

Making a comparison between the daily life of children in almost any U.S. location and in China IS difficult, even for folks who are familiar with both.

There is a great difference between urban an rural life in China, whereas in the United States the differences are pretty much minimal.

Traditional Chinese culture is quite different from Western culture, but their cultural traditions are not uniform. China is larger than all of Europe combined and the traditions in the North are different from the South, or West. China has been a more or less unified country for nearly two thousand years and people in every part of the country have a common written language. The ethnic Han are dominant, but there are many ethnic groups who are also Chinese. These range from the Mongols and "primitive" tribes to the descendants of Muslim traders. Traditional Chinese culture though dominant, is shot through with variations.

Life in rural China has always been different than life in the great cities that are mostly clustered within a narrow strip by the sea, or along China's rivers. Infrastructure is even today typically crude and limited. Rural China was sorely tested by Communist social engineering for about 50 years, yet traditional Chinese culture pretty much endured. Life in Chinese urban areas, on the other hand became less traditional in the same period, and has since been very influenced by Western culture. Urban Chinese are accustomed to living in much higher densities than most places in the West, yet in interior China population density drops off to less than we have in rural Southwestern America. ln the "outback" of China today there are few roads, fewer airports, and sporadic electrical service. Many villages have no telephone service at all. Electrical service is limited and sporadic, so if a village has even one television set, it might be considered advanced.

Whose China do you compare to the materialistically blessed U.S.?

The great majority of Chinese have always been poor peasant farmers working small plots of ground that frequently didn't even belong to them. The central power of the Emperor, or CCP, was taken for granted, and generally accepted by the population so long as they believed that the Mandate of Heaven was being served. Cooperation and submission to authority trumped individuality. The written word is traditionally an almost sacred thing. For thousands of years the only way out of a hard peasant life was to become literate and pass the Civil Service examinations. Actually, a talented and ruthless peasant might even rise to become Emperor during the chaos that attended the end of a Dynasty.

Some complain of the wide gulf that separates the bottom of the socio-economic from the very wealthy in the West. In China that gulf has always been thousands of times greater. A peasant had virtually no rights and was vulnerable to impressment into Imperial service, famine and flood. On the other hand the Imperial Court was richer and more powerful than the Czar in pre-revolutionary Russia. That disparity still exists, though there has been some improvement since the fall of the C'hing Dynasty in the early 20th century. The promise of a better life for the majority of Chinese by the Communists was an important factor in Mao's attempt to replace the Dynastic system that had existed since the pre-history of the nation.

Of course there are similarities in the children's life in China and the United States today. Children are prized and pampered in both the East and West. China's One Child Policy has been at best only partially successful; more so in urban areas than in the countryside. The policy has created an imbalance between boys and girls, and has accentuated the "spoiling" of little Princes and Princesses. In America the legacy of Dr. Spock and the permissive attitudes parents is somewhat similar, though Americans have more to give and may be tempered by the parents own self absorption.

Children go through the same basic stages of development from cradle through adolescence in China and the U.S. Both sets discover the world and interpret it mostly through observing the parents and inter-relating with their peers. Adolescents from both cultures tend to rebel against the social constraints and norms of their elders. Chinese urban youth mimic what they believe is popular in the West, and they become vulnerable to social suppression by the Party. U.S. teenagers do booze, drugs, and outrageous behavior, but generally get away with it in our more permissive culture.

I suggest you make a contrast between the more traditional rural villagers of China and modern American suburbia. You should be able to find a lot of material on traditional Chinese village life. Life in China is changing at least as fast as in the West, but Chinese life still largely runs along the rails of preindustrial tradition. Urbanization and the consumer society is a powerful magnet, but the great majority of Chinese are still very, very poor living on what they can grown on the very small plots that have been farmed for over a thousand years. Electrification and improved infrastructures will likely produce over time the loss of many traditional ways.

I've forgotten the title, but in one of my grad school classes we had a great book that focused entirely on describing traditional Chinese village life: generational relationships (family is even more important than in the West); social mores, and expectations; village, farm, and household economy; education and social standing; the Village in relation to other villages, the province and national authorities, and; customs, marriage, religion, and "leisure" activities (games, music, etc.). Not something that a child would understand, or even be able to read, but chock full of insights into how Chinese live and have lived for generations.