Differences in the perception of birth policies by the middle aged and the elderly in China

Abstract

Because of the drastic changes in China’s birth policies, it is anticipated that the middle-aged and the elderly would view the policy of ‘one household, two children’ differently. As such, this study seeks to identify such a difference between the middle-aged and the elderly. There were 320 sets of data for the elderly generation and 305 for the middle-aged generation used for the final analysis. The study shows that, unlike the elderly generation, the middle-aged group has a negative perception towards the ‘one household, two children’ policy. Second, for the elderly generation of China, there was a significant difference in their perception towards the ‘one household, two children’ policy and ‘preferred gender of children’ depending on what the gender of the respondent’s child was. The elderly with only daughters had a rather negative perception towards the policy, and their preferred gender for children was also ‘sons’. Third, middle aged people with daughters had a more positive perception towards the policy.