Parent-Child Relationship and Children's Socialization in Rural Javanese Family

In connection with social relations in a loosely structured social system

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the actual condition of parent-child relationship in the rural Javanese family, making it clear that a weak family or group membership of Javanese villagers fundamentally originates in the way of children's socialization in each family.
It may be safely said that Java has a loosely structured social system. One of the reasons seems to be that a group membership of Javanese villagers is such a weak one that the alternatives of their behaviours are very much permitted in various aspects of their lives. These attitudes of theirs, I think, are formed by children's socialization in each family.
The contents of this paper are as follows :
(1) I aim to take a general view of the studies which have ever been done with regard to the nature of Javanese social relations, the social change or the stagnation of modernization in rural Java, comparing Julius H. Boek's views with those of Clifford Geertz's.
(2) Some distinguishing features of the family structure in rural Java the weakness of a family membership of Javanese villagers.
(3) The Javanese parent-child relations and their development in the various stages of life ; distinction in mother-child relations which are intimate and reliant ; ambivalence in the relations between father and child.
(4) The contents and meanings of “urmat” (respect) and “rukun” (harmony, co-operation, unity of effort, minimization of conflicts) which are the very cores of home discipline ; children's internalization of them in the stages of their upbringing.