Filial Piety and Autonomous Development of Adolescents in the Taiwanese Family
The theory of filial piety describes important rules dictating how children should treat and take care of their parents. Filial piety has played a crucial role in Chinese society primarily through the influence of Confucianism. Initiated in China in the e
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Filial Piety and Autonomous Development of Adolescents in the Taiwanese Family Kuang-Hui Yeh
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Introduction
The theory of filial piety describes important rules dictating how children should treat and take care of their parents. Filial piety has played a crucial role in Chinese society primarily through the influence of Confucianism. Initiated in China in the early 1900s by Chen (1915), the famous New-Culture movement claimed that the authoritarian characteristics of filial piety were the core sources of the damage to the independence of one’s personality; they obstructed one’s freedom of thought, deprived people of equality under the law, and damaged productivity by fostering an excessive dependence. Wu (1917), a famous opponent of Confucianism supported the above points and concluded that filial piety had to be destroyed in China in order for the society to overcome autocratic thinking and to establish a true democracy. In recent decades, several researchers (e.g. Boey 1976; Ho 1994, 1996) have reinforced these arguments by noting that an emphasis on filial piety results in Chinese people having an uncreative character, poor cognitive development, and a negative personality orientation. However, other scholars have shown that filial piety leads to better intergenerational relationships (Lawrence et al. 1992), lower levels of parent-child conflict (Yeh and Bedford 2004), and greater financial, physical, and emotional support for parents (Ishii-Kuntz 1997), especially during times of illness (Lee 1997). These results imply that at least some aspects of filial piety are helpful to individuals’ social and psychological development. In an attempt to reconcile these conflicting results about the effects of filial piety on individual, social and psychological development, Yeh (1997) used confirmatory factor analysis in a study of Chinese people to identify two “super-factors” K.-H. Yeh (*) Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC e-mail: [email protected] D.L. Poston, Jr. et al. (eds.), The Family and Social Change in Chinese Societies, The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis 35, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7445-2_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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corresponding to the two stages of historical development of the concept of filial piety, namely, reciprocal filial piety, and authoritarian filial piety. Yeh’s dual filial piety model (Yeh 2003; Yeh and Bedford 2003) showed that the modern concept of filial piety can best be understood in terms of these two independent factors. Reciprocal filial piety tends to focus on maintaining harmonious interpersonal relationships with close relatives out of intimate affection and gratitude. The positive implications of this piety include better intergenerational relationships, lower levels of parent-child conflict, an egalitarian attitude, and empathetic behavior towards others. Conversely, authoritarian filial piety tends to accentuate inequalit
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