Chinese One Child Policy by Nick McDonough

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Chinese One Child Policy

Published on Nov 19, 2015

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BY NICK MCDONOUGH

The one child policy is a family policy that forces families to only have one child. If the families first child is a girl then they may have a second child. If both children were girls they were forbidden to have a third child. The policy was introduced in 1978 and enacted in 1980. It was created to lower the population and reduce the strain on scarce resources. This also improved living standards

The one child policy has had a big effect on the Chinese society. The policy has been estimated to have averted 200 million births from 1979 to 2009. This had both positives and negatives. A positive was that the health service for pregnant woman improved and there was a reduction of risk and death associated with pregnancy. It also means that there are more resources to go around. The main negative effect on the Chinese society is that there will be an aged population. This means that because there are less babies being born there will be more older people than younger people. This can be very bad economically wise for China because there will not be enough younger people to do all the jobs. Chinese families can be effected in the way that if a family has two girls then there is no chance for the family to carry on their family name. Being an only child can also put stress on the child to carry the family name and to look after his/her parents

Since the creation of the one child policy there has been a change implemented in 2013 called the "relaxed policy". It allows parents that are only child's them selves to have up to two children if they so wish. Only just under a million people have registered to have a second child out of 11 million people that could. A lot of parents are choosing not to have a second child because of the fact they will have to spend more money on more food, education, clothes etc.

I believe that today's Chinese families would be different to the past Chinese families because of the one child policy. A majority of today's Chinese families have only one child, but the a lot Chinese families in the past would've had two or three children. This means that today's Chinese family's spend less on food and other resources. This makes it easier for the parents to earn enough money for the children. In the past it would've been harder to earn enough money for your children if you had more of them.