Blog4)-"Ms Ivy Chan"-"Wang Kexin"-"Generation"

Generational Differences in my family

“You are much more fortunate than me when I was at your age”, which is the sentence that my mother often mentions when she talks about her childhood. Indeed, our generation is superior to my parents’ generation to some extent, for we are brought up in a much more peaceful and safer environment without historical or politic turbulences and economic oscillations. In terms of my family, my parents’ generation (1960s) and my generation (1990s) are different in many ways.

It is obvious that the family size in my generation is far smaller than my parents’. My mother has three older brothers and three older sisters, in other words, my grandmother gave birth to seven children, which made my grandmother known as “hero mother” in that age. And in my father’s family, he also has three brothers. Compared to them, I seemed alone, because I am the only child in my family. But this is the typical home-style in my generation. Almost all the families have one child because of China’s one-child policy that was put forward in 1980s.

Moreover, my parents and I were brought up in extremely different environments. My parents were brought up in the countryside while I was brought up in the city. In their childhood, as they said, they did not have any toys and the only thing that they can play with was the goat bone. Ridiculous as it may sound, but it was true. They threw a bone in the air and they tried to grab more bones before the bone dropping on the ground. Though it seems boring for me, they were really keen on this kind of game when they were young. Besides, they loved to play games on the field after school and they created a great number of games to play with. Almost thirty years passed, my generation came. When I was a child, I had much more choices of toys. Bikes, yo-yo, Babie dolls and many other kinds of entertainments enriched my childhood, let alone TV and computer games. In contrast, kids in my generation were more likely to spend time watching cartoons or son programs after school. But this does not mean that we did not have outdoor activities, sometimes we played on the playground or public gardens because there were no more fields in my city when I was young.

And what makes me jealous is that they had autumn holidays in school, for they had to help their parents harvest crops in autumn. Although I do not want to harvest crops, I still want to have an autumn holiday especially a holiday without additional tutorial studies. And when it comes to study, their generation is not as hardworking as my generation in general.

Though my parents’ generation and my generation have a lot of differences, it is still possible for us to communicate with each other. And I think we do not have a better generation or a worse generation, because every generation is unique and has its own features.