How did modern family born in Korea
200903450 French/EIT
Hyein Jin
In the traditional Korean society, family meant everything – a family was used to be a moral law, a school, a workplace, and even an absolute criterion to view the world. However, the average size of family is rapidly being smaller, and young people are never reluctant to say that they don't want to marry. Surely, it is not hard to imagine that our ancestors would be mad on us if they saw modern Koreans. What changes have been made in our society? How did Korean change their mind in such a short period? Why is family size being smaller? There would be a wide range of reasons, but most fundamentally, we may point out three causes: The decline of marriage / the rise of divorce rate, the change on family concept, and the decline of birth rate.
First, the decline of marriage and rise of divorce rate have fundamentally influenced to the size of modern family. In the statistics, Korea's marriage highly decreased since 1970, and hit a new low in 2009. It shows only 6.2 marriages per 1000 people, compared to 10.6 in 1980. Marriage had been considered as a social duty for Koreans due to the impact of Confucianism used to be the basis of Korean attitude. However, marriage is no longer being forced since people's way of thinking. At the same time, the divorce rate of Koreans notably climbed from 12.4% in 1998 to 23.1% by 2011. The rise of divorce rate refers to social change that divorce is gradually regarded acceptable. As a result of higher divorce rate, single family parents are increased, and it affects to the average family size of Korea.
Second, since the previous concept of family has been changed in people's mind, some people started to live without marriage and the size of family became smaller. Under the collapse of traditional beliefs and spread of individualism, personal desires have been diversified. Thus, people start to seek a new kind of partnership – the cohabitation. In recent research, over than 50% of Korean people in their twenties replied that they are not biased toward living together without marriage. This is a very striking fact comparing with the data of early 1990s, because cohabitation was totally tabooed in Korea for a long time. Therefore, some people think official marriage is not essential for their happiness. Furthermore, we should mention that same sex couples are also increasing. Thus, numerous people try to be free from the bondage of social convention, and they start to live as they personally desire.
Lastly, the decline of birth rate directly effected to the family size. Statistically, there are now only 1.23 children in one Korean family in average, which was 1.72 per a family in 2000. Decreasing fertility rate is relevant to the improvement of the status of women. Because women start to pursue their own life and career, giving birth to a child is not an urgent issue to a family anymore. In addition, a number of married women even avoid having a baby since the childrearing is still strongly considered as a 'woman affaire' in Korea. Young couples give up having a child recently. Consequently, the size of family is gradually becoming smaller in Korea.
The change of the family came from the decline of marriage and rise of divorce, and the change of the concept of partnership, and the decline of the birth rate. Certainly this is the era of 'the marriage as an option' and nation has no right to force marriage to people. However, some causes of smaller family, a low birth rate for example, are fretting Korean government. Above all, the real concern that we should carefully think about is that family is being undervalued among a lot of people. The culture and custom we enjoy until nowadays are driven from our family-based tradition, and there should be certain value that we are only able to learn inside of a family. In the middle of rapid growth of western individualism, it would worth thinking what family really means to us to keep the balance of our values.
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