I found a little park near my apartment this week where I could study and enjoy being outside. Because the heat was turned off a couple weeks ago, my apartment is often cooler than outdoors, so I go out to warm up! Every day that I went to study there, there were 10-15 kids under the age of 3, and it was fun to people-watch as I studied Chinese.
For each child, there was at least one caretaker, often a grandma, it seemed. If it wasn't the grandma watching the child, it seemed to be the mom, though it wasn't uncommon to see a grandpa, either. Many brought little stools down from their apartments to sit at eye-level with their baby in the stroller, or to have a place to sit other than the cement benches surrounding the area. Clothing usually doesn't show the sex of the child, so a common question was, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Sometimes the question wasn't necessary, if the baby was sitting in a position with the split pants open enough for the observer to tell! In the picture below, you can kind of see the split pants of the baby that is lying down.
The adults talked amongst themselves, not shy at all (they seemed to know each other from that same setting, and I did notice many of the same people the days that I went), and often the topic of conversation was the child. I read in a Chinese newspaper today (written in English, my Chinese characters aren't that good...yet!) that the average family in China has 2.9 members, which means that if one set of grandparents live with the family, which seems to be common, there are 4 adults for each child! This factor causes Chinese family dynamics to be very different than American family dynamics, I think.
I found a little park near my apartment this week where I could study and enjoy being outside. Because the heat was turned off a couple weeks ago, my apartment is often cooler than outdoors, so I go out to warm up! Every day that I went to study there, there were 10-15 kids under the age of 3, and it was fun to people-watch as I studied Chinese. 
For each child, there was at least one caretaker, often a grandma, it seemed. If it wasn't the grandma watching the child, it seemed to be the mom, though it wasn't uncommon to see a grandpa, either. Many brought little stools down from their apartments to sit at eye-level with their baby in the stroller, or to have a place to sit other than the cement benches surrounding the area. Clothing usually doesn't show the sex of the child, so a common question was, "Is it a boy or a girl?" Sometimes the question wasn't necessary, if the baby was sitting in a position with the split pants open enough for the observer to tell! In the picture below, you can kind of see the split pants of the baby that is lying down.
The adults talked amongst themselves, not shy at all (they seemed to know each other from that same setting, and I did notice many of the same people the days that I went), and often the topic of conversation was the child. I read in a Chinese newspaper today (written in English, my Chinese characters aren't that good...yet!) that the average family in China has 2.9 members, which means that if one set of grandparents live with the family, which seems to be common, there are 4 adults for each child! This factor causes Chinese family dynamics to be very different than American family dynamics, I think.
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