No Longer the One-Child Family: Parenting and Sibling Relationships in China

Speaker: Professor Bin-Bin Chen, Fudan University.

Abstract

Starting in 2016, the Chinese central government officially ended the one-child policy, which allowed parents across China to now have two children. In May 2021, the government further relaxed its population policy allowing couples to have up to three children. Although these policy changes were based more on considerations of social and economic development than concerns about children’s development and family functioning, these policies have important implications for both Chinese parents and their children. Very little practical information is available for those parents to help them adapt to the new family challenges.

Our recent research has begun to bridge that gap by showing how Chinese parents adaptively or maladaptively respond to the family changes with the arrival of the second child. In this talk, I will discuss three research questions. First, how do Chinese parents raise two children within a family? Second, how do Chinese firstborn children adapt to the transition to siblinghood? Third, how do sibling relationships influence Chinese children’s socioemotional development? I will show series of studies to (partly if not completely) answer these three questions. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that the relaxations in the population policy in China might influence parenting behaviours and child adjustment.

The talk will be followed by a short Q&A.

Bin-Bin Chen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Fudan University, China. He also held a Visiting Fellowship at Hughes Hall, University of Cambridge. His research interests include various aspects of family relationships and the social and emotional development of children and adolescents in Chinese contexts. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Fudan Sibling Project (FSP), a seven-year longitudinal investigation exploring changes in family functioning and the firstborn’s adjustment after the birth of a second child, which has received fundings from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has first-authored publications in such journals as Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Development and Psychopathology. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Research on Adolescence and has served on numerous editorial boards including Children, International Journal of Behavioural Development, and Social Development. He was the 2023 recipient of the SRCD Asian Caucus Early Career Award.