June 20, 2023 at 2:03 am
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Chen Dudu has been a full-time daughter for the past few months.
29-year-old Julie works as a game planner in a company in Beijing. The frequent overtime work over the years has gradually become too much for her. In April of this year, after discussing with her retired parents, she decided to resign and go home to accompany her two elders, and at the same time make a good plan for the next period of her life.
In addition to spending more time with her parents, she doesn’t really need much help at home. But she said that as an only child, she, who had never done housework before, now started tidying up the room.
Julie said that the daily expenses are mainly borne by her parents, and her mother also proposed to give her 2,000 yuan a month for living expenses, but she did not accept it.
Parents do not seem to have high demands on her, they only hope that she can “maintain a normal life, don’t go to bed too late, and don’t indulge yourself too much.”
The lifestyle of “full-time sons and daughters” like Julie’s has become popular among young people in China, causing heated discussions on the Internet and the attention of academic circles. Most of them are frustrated at the beginning of their careers or their careers have entered a bottleneck period. They decide to go back home to live with their parents, and gain recognition by accompanying their parents or taking on some housework.
Some people even signed a simple labor contract with their parents, which listed the payment and remuneration-how much to do a housework, how much to spend with their parents for an hour.
Behind the “full-time children” is China’s high unemployment rate. The latest official data from China shows that in May this year, the unemployment rate of young people aged 16 to 24 rose to 20.8%, hitting a record high for two consecutive months since statistics began in 2018. Among them, the situation of college graduates is even worse. According to Zhuo Xian, a researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council of China, the unemployment rate of college students is 1.4 times that of the overall youth unemployment rate, making them the main group of youth unemployed.
Lu Xi, an assistant professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said: “Full-time children are an inevitable phenomenon under the tide of social unemployment, which reflects the serious decline and shrinking of the entire social economy.”
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workplace anxiety
Julie said that after working for five or six years, working overtime is commonplace. In the months before resignation, the company made it even more mandatory to work overtime. She often leaves home at 9 o’clock in the morning and comes back after 1 o’clock in the evening, “live like a walking dead.”
“I can’t fall asleep without sleeping pills at night. I dream that I’m in the company, and the content of the dream is also related to work. Then I wake up in the morning and go to work again. I feel like I’m working 24 hours a day.”
The 996 work schedule (9 to 9, six days a week) is fairly common in China, especially in the tech industry. In the fierce market competition, many start-ups can only pursue speed and intensity because they have no core competitiveness, so they require employees to work overtime, and usually do not pay the corresponding remuneration.
Zhu Li said that if a colleague leaves the company, the human resources department will quickly receive hundreds of resumes, and recruiting new people has never been a problem, which also contributes to the overtime culture in the company. “After working overtime for three months, I found that almost half of the team’s colleagues were unknown to me.”
The parents accepted her to be a “full-time daughter” at home, because they felt that the reason why her daughter couldn’t find a partner at such an age was largely related to overtime work. So I understand her resignation and hope she can find a job with relatively free time.
Chen Dudu, who was engaged in real estate-related work in Chongqing, resigned at the beginning of this year and returned to his hometown in a small county in Yunnan, becoming a “full-time daughter”.
Her industry has been particularly down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company calculates wages based on basic salary plus commission, and the income has dropped sharply in the past one or two years. After deducting the daily expenses including the monthly rent of 2,000 yuan, there is basically not much left.
“Assessments are becoming more and more stringent, and the performance is even lower than the target at the best time,” said 27-year-old Chen Dudu. Coupled with the depression brought about by the long-term lockdown in many places during the epidemic, she felt that “suddenly there is no hope.”
“The time last year made me think, why is it so sad to be a worker, you have to get up early every day, go to work without doing anything, do repetitive work every day, and get such a small salary, I think it’s too sad, why do people live like this? ”
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Chen Dudu is in his hometown of Yunnan.
Gap year? Eat old?
Some people compare “full-time children” with the popular “gap year” among foreign university graduates. Many graduates use this transitional period to experience themselves in society, or plan for the next step of changing careers or improving their competitiveness in the workplace.
However, some scholars pointed out that “full-time children” are suspected of gnawing on the old, and their impact on the family and society cannot be underestimated.
Scholar Lu Xi said that young people who choose a “gap year” generally have very clear plans. The most common is to go out to study for a master’s degree or participate in other vocational training during the break in the workplace, even if a small number of people choose to travel , It is also a choice made with very strong expectations and confidence in the future career.
However, most of China’s “full-time children” are forced to stay at home, without a clear career plan, and they cannot accumulate social practice while staying at home. As the competition in the job market becomes more and more fierce, more and more people are taking the public and postgraduate entrance examinations; even if they pass the entrance examination, they will face greater pressure from the future unemployment market, and may not be able to find a suitable job.
According to reports, a record 11.58 million students will graduate from higher education institutions in China this year, an increase of 7.6 percent compared to last year. At the same time, the number of postgraduate graduates is also growing. In 2020, the Ministry of Education announced an increase of nearly 190,000 postgraduate enrollment places, an expansion rate much higher than the previous ratio. And this group of students will also graduate this year and enter the job market.
Lu Xi said that under such circumstances, many people being full-time children is actually “a kind of self-anesthesia when self-worth cannot be recognized and accepted by society.”
At the same time, from the perspective of the government, citing new terms such as “full-time children” or encouraging discussions on the Internet about the phenomenon of “full-time children” is mainly to avoid using words such as “high unemployment rate” in order to reduce social pressure. Contradictory, he said.
But in the final analysis, “The essence of full-time children is unemployment,” Lu Xi said bluntly.
“Considering the labor force participation rate, as well as the proportion of postgraduate entrance examinations and public examinations, the unemployment rate of Chinese young people will far exceed 20%, so there will be more and more full-time children in China in the future, especially among fresh graduates.”
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Some scholars believe that, in the final analysis, the essence of full-time children is unemployment.
Lu Xi said that full-time children will reduce the disposable income of the parents’ generation, especially when parents pay a certain amount of remuneration to their children, which will eventually lead to a downgrade of the entire family’s consumption.
For parents, the money could have flowed to the market to buy goods or services. For children, taking money from their parents means that their future income expectations will decline, and at the same time, their own consumption will also decline due to the reduction of new wealth created.
“The more full-time children there are, the faster consumption in society will degrade,” Lu Xi said.
From an individual point of view, he suggested that young people can choose to start their own businesses, or turn their attention to foreign markets, such as looking for opportunities in Southeast Asian countries with relatively prosperous economies. At the same time, he warned that this needs to be done by personal opportunity and personality, and it is not suitable for everyone.
Zhou Yun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Michigan (University of Michigan), compared “full-time children” with “full-time mothers”. She said that more than 20 years ago, there was a “full-time” trend in American society-white-collar mothers with higher education “voluntarily quit” the workplace and returned to the family to be full-time mothers. At that time, under the joint discipline and expectation of “ideal employees” and “ideal mothers”, women had to make an either-or choice. “These mothers are not so much ‘withdrawn’ as they are ‘squeezed out’.”
Similarly, in today’s China, a series of social factors such as “the unfavorable employment situation, the workplace’s requirements for 996 ‘ideal employees’, how people imagine the future after the epidemic, and how they imagine their connection with society and the country” have caused some young people to struggle. Don’t be a full-time child, she said.
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Difficulty finding employment
Julie said that her parents have already retired, and each receives a monthly pension of several thousand yuan. For her, being a “full-time child” can only be an expedient measure.
In the past half a month, she has sent more than 40 resumes to intermediary companies and recruiting units, but most of them have disappeared, and only two have received interview notices.
“Before I resigned, I felt that it was difficult to find a job, but after I actually resigned, I found that it was even more difficult to find a job,” Julie said.
She studied in a university abroad and returned to Beijing to work after graduating in 2017. In that year, China’s GDP growth rate reached nearly 7% for the whole year, realizing the first rebound in seven years. She quickly found a decent job.
However, in recent years, the Chinese government has focused on rectifying industries such as the Internet, games, and education and training. Many companies have reported large-scale layoffs under the impact. Coupled with the strict lockdown during the epidemic and the stagnation of business activities, China’s economy has slowed down sharply. Under such circumstances, competition in the job market has intensified, and problems such as the depreciation of academic qualifications, low starting salaries, and prevalence of overtime work have occurred, making it difficult for many young people to find employment.
Julie said that she was surprised to find that more and more new colleagues around her either graduated from key universities in China or returned from studying in prestigious overseas universities. She said that game design itself does not require a high degree of education, and the reason why these high-achieving students come in to compete is largely because they cannot find jobs in better positions. Employment space for graduates of prestigious schools.
In the two interviews she received recently, she lost to students who graduated from prestigious schools. She regretted her decision to rush back to China for employment, “I regret not continuing my postgraduate studies abroad.”
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Resurrection?
Some people say that although the lives of full-time children are very comfortable, “lying flat” is just an appearance, and anxiety is their normal state.
“It’s impossible to be without (anxiety),” said Chen Dudu of Yunnan. There were two voices fighting in her heart: “One is very self-willed, I think it is rare to have this kind of time, and I haven’t thought about future plans, so I have to enjoy the present; the other is reminding you, I will give you three or four In a few months, you have to start thinking about what to do next, and you can’t go on like this.”
Although the parents didn’t say anything, they also had worries in their hearts. Parents occasionally ask her what she plans to do next.
“You can actually hear it when you ask this way, they are a little worried,” Chen Dudu said, “I don’t know the future plan, but I can’t tell them I don’t know, I will say that I will rest for a while before talking. ”
Looking back on the experience of being a full-time daughter in the past few months, Chen Du said with emotion: “My parents are very hardworking people. Looking back now, I really feel quite embarrassed. I sleep at home until 10 o’clock every day, and They get up at seven or eight o’clock to go to work, and they work so hard in their 50s, but I lie flat at home.”
“I think if it goes on for a long time, I’m really going to gnaw away at the old age,” she said.
Her mentality has changed, from “wanting to lie flat” after the setback in the workplace to “the paper must be rolled”. She now has a new goal. Forced himself, he simply decided on the itinerary and ended the comfortable life of a full-time daughter. She has left the real estate industry and returned to the big city to start a business.
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Chen Dudu, whose family is in Yunnan, said, “If it goes on for a long time, I will indeed grow old.”
Julie from Beijing said that she would try her best to control her anxiety. “After all, I resigned to maintain my mental health. If you continue to worry because you can’t find a job, it is equivalent to resigning in vain.”
In order to avoid “eating the old”, Julie set a limit for herself, “you can’t use your parents’ money for consumption other than food, drink, housing and transportation.”
She sold her old books and celebrity customized products she had saved up when she was young to save some pocket money. She also used the savings from her previous work to make financial products. “If the market is good, you can earn 50 to 100 yuan a day.”
In addition to open source, she also worked hard to reduce expenditure. In the past, she would stock up on a lot of things during the “618” discount period, but now she doesn’t buy anything. In a high-consumption place like Beijing, she tries to keep her spending at 1,000 yuan a month.
After looking for a job for almost a month, there were still very few interviews, so Julie decided to change careers. Taking advantage of the convenience of being a full-time son and daughter-no need to pay rent, and relatively loose time-she started writing online articles for a living, and set a goal of 5,000 words a day for herself.