Vietnamese more open to “non-traditional family”

VietNamNet Bridge – The Institute of Social, Economic and Environment Research (iSEE) has reported results of its survey, saying that Vietnamese are now more open to nontraditional families.

The survey results were issued at the workshop “The core values and challenges of the contemporary forms of family in Vietnam”.

According to the institute’s survey of 1,500 people, conducted in May and June 2015, Vietnamese families are facing conflict and disagreement between members of the family, adultery, debt and other issues.

The report said that 27.5% of families faced disagreements between generations (parents, grandparents, children); 16% face the risk of adultery of wife/husband or both; and 9.9% are in conflict because of debt.

At least 19.6% of women said that adultery was unacceptable while only 10.1% of men agreed.

The percentage of women who felt “unpeaceful” or “dissatisfied” with some aspects of family life such as the share of feelings, caring, the faithfulness of their husbands, and the division of housework was significantly higher than men.

Regarding the survey, iSEE’s expert Pham Thanh Tra said that while the traditional view of the family (the family must have parents and children) still prevailed, some new perspectives and new values of family had appeared.

Besides love as a universal value, personal freedom, privacy and honesty are the new values that were selected by many people.

The change in view of the type and value of the family was shown through support to families with the wife or husband being a foreigner (49%) or same-sex family (19%).

Relatively high proportions of respondents had a neutral or positive viewpoint of single-parent family from divorce (35.3%), single family due to not getting married (33.7%), living together without getting married (26. 4%) or family without children (32.1%).

Urban residents are more in favor of non-traditional families than those in rural areas.

Love and sharing remain the core values

Mr. Hoa Huu Van, Deputy Director of the Family Department of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, stressed: “In the changing trend of the family in general and the variety of the type of family in particular, amid the multidimensional impact of the process of industrialization and international integration, we believe that the function of psychological and emotional satisfaction will become the dominant function of the family, beyond all other functions such as reproductive, economics and social education of children.”

Van said that love and the sharing would be the core and immutable values of Vietnamese families.

On the sidelines of the workshop, Mr. Bakhodir Burkhanov, Vietnam deputy director of the UN Development Program (UNDP) said: “The International Declaration of Human Rights affirms that everyone has the right to create a family, including single people, transgender people or two adults regardless of their gender. We encourage and support the Vietnamese Government and National Assembly to find the challenges that these vulnerable groups are facing and protect the family creation right.”

Thu Ly

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