Traditional Chinese Family Intergenerational Ethics And Its Modern Transformation

Family, as an organic part that makes up the society, shows absolutely the basic situation of social-ethical relationships of generations, whereas Family-ethical kinship of generations has its exclusive characteristics which can not be replaced by social-ethical relationships of generations. It is the consanguinity, natural instincts, fair steadiness, and permanence of family-ethical kinship of generations that play an important role in reflecting power of relative kinship, connecting family-ethical kinship of generations, and helping to change by persuasion with morality.Traditional Chinese family-ethical kinship of generations is based on the self-sufficient peasant sector of the economy, and on the deep-rooted kinship of family worship and supreme. Five feudal orders of seniority in human relationships, which mostly consist of the ethics of patriarchal kindness and posterity's obedience, and the relations in brotherhood and between elders and youngest, are the typically-ethical culture of traditional chinese society. According to that feudal ethical code, children should support, respect, please their parents, in turn, while parents should also love with selfless and set a good example with affection. As an important part of traditional family-ethical kinship of generations, the ethics of patriarchal kindness and posterity's obedience serves a link of culture between past and future, has a deeply influence upon the formation of the traditional Chinese virtue and contributes to the family harmony and social steadiness.Since the introduction of market economy, the contradictions between past times and nowdays have appeared, such as, close against open, similar against various, and slow against fast in social alteration, lead to the generation gaps and new features of family-ethical kinship of generations, like that private interests damage family relationships gradually, the consciousness of equality among family members arises. However, accompanied with the social alteration, there are also some negative aspects, such as showing less regard for one's elders while spoiling youngest, which means the degeneration of family-ethical kinship. Therefore, it is necessary to reform the contemporary-ethical relationship of family generations to keep pace with the development of times.Reforming the contemporary-ethical relationship of family generations aims at living a comfortable and graceful life, so the article focuses on the analyses on how to promote attachment among family members by communication, how to show virtue of spirit and affection to each other. In order to achieve the goal, the author advocates expanding the positive effects of traditional Chinese kindness and piety on contemporary society, and make them supplement one another. The author advocates that education should foster the young's consciousness of feeling graceful and repaying parents for love and kindness and remove generation gap by practice in daily life and making use of internet. What is more, with attention to humanism, the author advocates that reforming the family-ethical kinship of generations has to be based upon the instructions of obligation, sentiment, self-restraint and mutual benefit so as to make family become the paradise of freedom, comfort, and ease.