The Study On The Marginalization Of "Shidu" Tarents And The Adjustment Of Their Role

As ancient saying goes, "having no male heir is the gravest of three cardinal offenses against filial piety". This traditional concept has brought population pressures in China for many years. However, with the requirement and development of the modern society, on one hand, the strict family planning program carried out in China helps to slow down the population increase and improve the population quality; on the other hand, psychologically, people tend to adopt the attitude of having fewer children. As the number of one-child families increases gradually, it brings some new social issues--"shidu issues", which means the social phenomena that the "shidu parents" who have lost their only child have to confront many predicaments owing to the uniqueness of the children and some objective risk factors in our society.As always, Chinese families have the notion of collective. Children bear a special status in a family, and function as psychological dependence, economic support and motivation power. As a consequence, loss of the only child will bring mess into the stable family structure, and it can not meet material and spiritual requirements, so the unexpected loss of children will not only bring harm to family, but also take great pain to society. The root of the "shidu parents" is the problems of the only child. The two things stand in relations of cause and effect, namely the latter leads to the former. However, the former is not the only reason of the latter. Then how are the "shidu parents" gradually marginalized? The focus of this thesis is to explore the logic of the marginalization of these parents. The root of this problem is internal reason which is the essential factor. What’s more, the external factor is also unnecessary. In other words, the roots of the "shidu issues" come from these parents themselves, namely the roles they play by themselves.There exists some differences between the role identification, social situation and role interaction of the parents who lost their only child. The difference means the gap between social role expectancy and the actual role of the patents. The gap will continue to expand since its existence and it leads to the lack of mental support, substance dependence and adaptive capacity of "shidu parents". It is the multiple lost that leads the "shidu parents" to a marginal predicament. Two primary reasons result in the marginal predicament of the "shidu parents":passive marginal predicament which caused by social exclusion and active marginal predicament which caused by individual psychological elements. Based on the analysis of role distance theory, this article proposes two countermeasures of role shift from the microcosmic and macroscopic aspects, hoping to narrow the gap of the role distance of the "shidu parents" and helping them to get out of the dilemma and adapt to the society.