Household Composition and Extended Kinship in Taiwan

The extended family has been an essential part of Chinese society, both in cultural ideal and social reality. The traditional Chinese ideal has been for co-residence of parents with their married sons and their families in a large, joint-stem household unit. The reality, in Taiwan and elsewhere, has deviated from the ideal in several ways. First, for any given young couple, relatives necessary for a joint-stem family may not be available at one or another stage of the family life cycle. Secondly, even when all the necessary relatives are available, the emphasis has been on the vertical filial tie, rather than the horizontal fraternal tie, so the predominant fact has been co- residence of parents with a married son. Married brothers usually do not live together and, if they do, it is usually when the parent is or has been in the same unit. Taiwan is an excellent place to observe the survival and changing character of the Chinese family, since modernization has been rapid in terms of such characteristics as industrialization, urbanization, education, communication systems, increasing income and equity in its distribution. There has also been rapid demographic change, producing low death rates, rapidly declining both rates, and large-scale use of birth control. These are trends usually believed to shatter traditional familial relationships and secularize traditional familial values. Our data indicate, to the contrary, that traditional familial household structure and familial attitudes are still very strong. Maintenance of many aspects of the traditional family and modernization in other ways do not appear to be grossly inconsistent, at least in the short run.