Park Sae-whan / Assignment5/ Tues34

 

In the 21st century where no society is immune from individualism, more and more people prefer living with smaller families or even alone to living with big families in traditional ways. It is not surprising to see that most families nowadays consist of parents and one or two offspring, and the number of newborn babies keeps decreasing each year in Korea. There are some causes of this trend from large families to nuclear families, which displays positive and negative effects on modern world.

First of all, people these days choose to form smaller families due to insensitivity from their traditional obligation to support their old parents. Koreans used to think – and many of them still believe – that supporting their parents, especially husbands’, was part of their duty after they became extremely old and powerless. And old parents also had expectation to be supported by their sons or daughters like they did in the past. However, things have changed in modern lifestyles where old parents choose not to give extra burdens to their grownups and pursue happiness without supports. As a result, sense of extreme individualism can be rooted in our society, because people no longer bear any responsibility for their old parents who raised them since they were born and even their children cannot learn how to respect the old.

Secondly, skyrocketing living and educating costs can be another cause of smaller families. People seek ways to reduce living costs amid escalating economic downfall, and some of them even get abundant and lead a difficult life. In this situation, supporting their old parents under the one roof might come to them as luxury. Furthermore, they are obsessed with their children’s education, so parents put much of their income in expensive private institutions and extracurricular activities for their children. At this difficult time, raising smaller families seems like an effective way for them to save money.

Finally, old parents are not willing to live with their own sons or daughters because they choose to live more comfortably on their own. Old parents used to take it for granted living in the same house with their sons or daughters. However, they now think that living together becomes very uncomfortable even if their sons or daughters want to do so. So they rather choose to live freely while receiving a small amount of living expenses from their grown-up children. Consequentially, travel agencies in Korea release more and more travel products for silver users, not to mention the fact that music concerts, movie theaters and other leisure activities are targeting old people.

In conclusion, the changing trend from large families to small families is inevitable in modern lifestyles, for the traditional obligation to support old parents abates among people, rising living and education expenses give young parents too much burden to make big families, and finally, old parents themselves don’t want to live in the same house with their sons or daughters. Smaller families might sometimes bear some negative effects, so it is upmost importance for us to guide this trend in better ways.