West vs East : Relationship and family values.

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Not sure whether to post this in L&D or PPR, I will let the mods decide.

This thread, as the title suggests, is about....well...read the title. Duh.


Anyway, the reason why I got the idea on making this thread, is the pattern I keep noticing in the frequent anecdote stories that I hear in life and in online forums- a pattern of West and East.

Note: This is a generalization thread, it's about patterns, and of course it doesn't apply on every individual or community within west or east

First, let's define what's Western world and Eastern World.

So here are the striking social differences from what I gathered:

- The Age of moving out:
In the West: Typically at age 18-19, kids are raised on the idea that they will have to move out one day and support themselves, and to become fully independent after 18 as soon as possible

In the East: Not so..... age of moving out often happens upon marriage, even in Russia, from what I gathered about Russia, fellas there typically move out at age 27-28. In Russia, like in most parts of the East, parents stress more on the idea of marriage: Eastern and Russian children are rather expected to raise a family, and/or get a job - which is usually viewed more important than early independence. In either situation living at home is probable.
Very often young Easterners/Russian married couples live with their parents. This frequently produces problems in communication; the issues between parent and child change to household issues, problems of territorial division and problems of ownership.


- Elder care (again from what I gathered)
In the West: Nursing homes for elders are not uncommon, people who get too old to walk or to go bathroom... often get taken care by nursing homes or retirement communities.

In the East: No much so, nursing homes are often only for childless elders.... letting an old parent in nursing homes is highly seen shameful (throwing them away), and the default expectation is at least one of the sons/daughters - daughters more often, to take care of the old parents and that including feeding them, showering them and even diaper them. In many instance, the child who takes the duty of the caregiver of his/her old parent often his/her social life gets deteriorated, and remains unmarried as a result.
If all children happen to be married, then the one who can afford most space would let the old parent move in with him/her (and that often create tension) - some families would keep an old parent in the parental house and hire a caregiver for this job, but it is still expected on the children to do frequent visits and to check on everything -


I confirm this is true for many Asian cultures, in India and almost in the entire Islamic and Arab world - so almost all what is considered East.
Relevant article: http://theweek.com/articles/462230/how- ... ound-world


- Arranged marriage:
In the West: Rare and not highly regarded.
In the East: In sharp decline in urban areas, but still pretty common in rural areas.


- Attitude toward pre-marital sex:

Here you can find a striking difference between East and West when it comes to premarital sex (again, Latin America is not considered West nor Central Africa is considered East.. in this thread): http://www.statista.com/statistics/2972 ... rital-sex/



The difference is....so striking.
The only Western countries in this poll are: Canada, Australia, Britain, Italy, Greece, Czech, Spain and France....and they are all on the top of sexual liberation attitude (scroll down to the bottom) - Chile while it's latin america, more than half of its population is European descendants (71% according to a DNA study).

This ranking cannot be a coincidence.

* As you can see Japan is the most sexually liberated among Eastern countries, even higher than Russia - but it is sill less liberated than most Western countries.
Even Russia has a much lower result than all western countries.


In the West, sex expected within a relationship of bf/gf, if there's none then something is considered wrong. Physical intimacy and kissing is an integral part of the bf/gf relationship and a way to determine compatibility.

In the East, (if the relationship is not arranged), sex isn't expected or at least not publicly expected. Usually when the woman is against premarital sex (let's face it, most guys anywhere wouldn't mind sex) then the couple may remain sexless for too long and maybe even until marriage.
From a Western perspective this style of dating can seem a bit childish and immature. Some of that feeling stems from the Eastern style of dating being similar to how in the West date during ....high school. Adult dating in the West moves a bit faster than the East.



There are more points to add...but I am tired now.

You can add your own observations too?

I wouldn't say that most people move out by age 18-19 even in the Western world. That was more true 30-40 years ago. Not true now.

Most young people stay with their families until their mid-20's, at least. This is especially so if the young person goes to University/college. The trend, definitely, is for young people to stay living with their parents longer owing to economic conditions.

I would say that placing parents in nursing homes/assisted living, etc. is more common in English-speaking areas than in, say, Spanish/French-speaking areas. In the areas where people speak Romance languages, elders are quite well respected, and usually live in their childrens' home.

Why was it so common for people to move out at 18-19 years old 30-40 years ago?

I think you're right that now people stay at home until their mid twenties, partly because nowadays it takes longer to save for a downpayment on a home.

The funny thing is, while nowadays it's commonplace for people to stay at home until their mid twenties, the stigma from 30-40 years ago still remains. It's like our culture is lagging behind reality. Even guys in their early-mid twenties get called basement dwellers for living at home.

As for the difference between East and West, the most obvious thing to me is work ethic. In Asia they take it way too far. Some of the Asian salarymen stay at the office from morning 'till well into the night but I've seen plenty of westerners do this as well.

The schools are a big difference. It varies with each part of Asia. The Philippines I've been speaking to say from age 5 to 17, they go to school from 7AM to 5PM, 6 days per week. That's a 60 hour week. And they still have homework.

My Kung Fu instructor says we can only really concentrate for 90 minutes per day. After reading about this Chinese boarding school where they study 14 hours per day, 7 days per week. I think my instructor must be wrong or else they'd learn for their first 90 minutes of class time and learn nothing for the rest of the day. Clearly they learn all day.

Here is another example, from South Korea. A day in the life of a girl who sleeps from 2AM to 6:30AM. The rest of the time she studies.There are plenty of articles that say sleep deprivation impairs learning ability and general brain function yet these South Korean students get better results than their western counterparts? How can that be? Maybe the articles are wrong or maybe they just have 50,000 times more willpower.See? Even when they're chronically sleep deprived they can still work twice as fast and get a perfect score. What can we conclude from this?

I read stuff like this and I'm disgusted. Disgusted that I'm so lazy compared to them. Disgusted that I can't do the same thing

Another difference I've noticed is that Eastern societies are more harmonies. In the West we thrive on interpersonal conflict. We expect it. It's a part of our culture. In the East they avoid conflict and value harmony.

I think in the East people are more content. They accept what they can't change and work hard to change what they can. In the West, people thrive on drama. People yearn to change things they can't change and suffer in anguish when they can't and tell everyone all about it. In the East, they just accept things they can't change and don't worry about them.

In the West it seems like everyone is a drama queen. There are no drama queens in the East. For this reason I think Easterners are generally happier and more content than Westerners.

Also, while Westerners may move out of home later than they used to, at least by some point in their twenties they become an independant agent and start making their own decisions. Not so in the East.

That Chinese girl I've been seeing. I suggested that she should stay in Australia. She said her parents wanted her to go back to China next year. I said that she doesn't need to listen to her parents because she's 25 years old. She was quite taken aback by this.

Not so in the west. I rarely see my parents or think about them and I try not to acknowledge their existence because talking about them in public is a sign of immaturity.

Yes, some stereotypes really do have some truth to them.

Asian people tend to be smarter due to having more stressful, hardworking cultures that encourage success.

Many over-populated Asian nations have more competitive educational environments as there's only a limited number of places available for senior high school (post-10th grade, e.g. year 11 and 12) and university.

I've also observed Asian cultures having more controlling, strict and over-protective parents that may still dictate their sons and daughters life and decisions well into adulthood.

I honestly don't think the difference in work is (as) much though, at least not today.

Young people in the west today are studying and working harder than ever, losing more sleep than ever, etc. Some studies somewhere are saying the average uni student in U.S. and Australia and such today is averaging around 4 to 4 and a half hours a night.

There is actually a concept uni first-year students gain more weight in their first year then they do in the other years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshman_15

Yeah, that's how much sleep I got when studying but that was more due to internet addiction and the fact that Star Trek was on TV1 from midnight to 1AM. At least this demonstrated to me that it is possible to function on little sleep. I felt bad waking up but after an hour I felt normal and alert.

Maybe what causes Western students to sleep less is the fact that they spend more time on other stuff. Many of them have jobs. Even when their families are wealthy, they encourage them to get jobs. This pushes their study time later into the night. In the East it would be unthinkable for students to have a job.

Many of them do more extracurriculars. True in Japan they have after school clubs but these are more for fun. I've heard plenty of Americans say they worry they don't have enough extracurriculars to fill their college applications. This will also push their study time later into the night.Too true. Lately I've been studying for my ISTQB exam and I've found that I do a lot better if I eat a chocolate bar every couple of hours.

I'm surprised these students don't gain weight before they enter college. Don't they stress eat in high school? Maybe they don't find it as stressful. I was stressed as hell in high school so freshmen year must be even worse.

Or more likely, maybe when they travel away from home to live in a college dorm, they now have full control over their eating and grocery shopping and that makes them gain weight.

I remember when I first started shopping for myself I bought a lot of junk food.

Maybe for some it was common in high school, but yeah definitely not for me.

I also never understood why so many of my peers had found studying so hard and lost so much sleep over it.

All the time I heard of my classmates talking about how they pulled all-nighters or stayed up until 4am then slept till 6 to complete their assignments and such.

Maybe they only waited until the last minute to do them, because I didn't struggle at all with the assignments or studying, paced myself well and did a little at a time each 1-2 days, so by the time I'd have to turn it in ther'e'd jus be a few last minute tweaks and edits and it'd be done, or at test time I'd have sufficient knowledge to pass.

I was a straight C guy though, so maybe those that placed unnecessary stress on themselves were the high achievers who wanted an A/the best possible Uni chances.

And they'd be right because there's a certain course I can't do because my damn OP (QLD equivalent score/rank thing) isn't good enough. OP's can NOT be changed. The uni guide books even say if you are ineligible for a certain course, you will not be accepted. That's it. They don't list any alternatives because it appears that there IS NONE.

A possible idea for me as a career or just something to study is to be a Nutritionist/Dietitian. There's two courses available for these two specific things. The other closest things are Sports Nutrition, etc.

One course is to qualify you as only a Nutritionist and one to qualify you as both a nutritionist and dietitian (they are two different things, dietitians are more qualified and can do more things than just a nutritionist).

Thank god I can do the Nutritionist one, but the dietitian one has a stricter OP score to live up to.

I think it's reasonable to ask of a certain OP score but some courses have higher expectations than others, specifically Science, Medical, Mathematics, etc.

Nevermind the fact I got a C in Biology in Year 11 and a B in Year 12, my OP of 16 or so isn't enough to meet the Dietitian's 8. 16 is also only just good enough to study the Nutritionist course.

QLD's ranking system is OP of 1 to 25, 1 being the best.

Most of the courses here for Uni require minimum of OP 16, so 16-25 are pretty much screwed. I just scraped enough to be able to still have a decent amount of study options available but it is still quite hindering.

But anyway, I think when it comes to unhealthy eating, junk food is also simply cheaper.

Uni students usually just don't have the time or money for healthy eating, especially since in some cases the very serious about dieting and exercise like to buy all these expensive supplements and protein shakes and such (this is me).

I don't know how to cook yet but will soon learn, and I eat 2 healthy homecooked meals a day made by my Mum, one for dinner and leftovers for dinner are put in a container for me for lunch the next day.

It might take less time to cook for 1, and I do know a few uni students who lift weights who will cook a week's worth of homecooked meals to refrigerate beforehand, but it still chews up a considerable chunk of time to cook full meals rather than just putting some noodles in the microwave for two minutes or getting some other fast food.

I eat 6 meals a day and not even studying or working yet but if we're going to be going out somewhere I have to work my eating and drinking around it. For this reason I almost never eat out or buy water when out because I'm well hyrdated, have a water bottle with me, and eat foods that keep me feeling full for the better part of the day out.

Even a day completely at home eating is a chore for me and I could still be making small chews and nibbles to my dinner at midnight.

See i eat a very healthy diet and it is harder to get calories this way. When trying to gain muscle I've got to be eating a lot, but right now I'm losing weight and it's a little easier and less of a hassle but I still feel like I'm spending at least 50% of my day eating. I'm saying even when trying to lose weight I still have to eat so much to prevent myself from eating too little (because i'll lose weight too fast this way, and losing weight too fast can result in muscle loss) because I don't just snack out on junk foods like others do (which tend to be loaded with calories).

One donut is 200 calories, that's 30 Almond Nuts. It takes me about 10 seconds to eat a donut, but 30 almonds? Probably 20 minutes.

A cup of 2 minute noodles is around 1,000-1,500 calories and takes 2 minutes to prepare, about 10-20 to eat.

Plenty of healthy homecooked meals can take 30 minutes to 2 hours and one serving may only be worth about 500-800 cal.

The "American Dream" was to own your own home "with a white picket fence" as they used to say. So moving out, and getting your own place, was a right of passage that young people tended to strive for.

This has become less common today because of the growing gap between housing prices and wages. When my parents moved out togather, my mother made $700 per month and their rent was $75 per month. $75 is 10.7% of her monthly wage. That same place is about $2500 today, and the wages for the same job, is about $2,580 per month.

Do you see the problem here?

If my parents had been young today, my mother would have had to pay 96.9% of her monthly pay for rent.

Oh that's terrible. I was talking to my uncle. He said you shouldn't spend more than a quarter of your income on rent. Unfortunately while I make $4,369 per month my rent is $1,382 per month. This makes it hard to pay off my credit card and saving for a downpayment on a house seems like a very distant dream.

If I had a decent job when I was living at home a lot more of my income could have gone to saving. I'll bet someone with a decent job could save for a downpayment in only a few years if they were living at home. Some of the youths I know buy a house, rent it out and say they won't move into it until after they get married.

This means their tenants pay their mortgage for them while they use their spare cash to build their stock portfolio. If only I was younger and living at home I could get rich from negative gearing.

$75 per month? Even accounting for inflation that's only $276 per month in today's dollars. Now it's so much more. How did the rent get so high? How did real estate prices get so high? Nowadays inner suburban family homes are worth literally millions of dollars. Who could pay for that while raising a family?

Meanwhile, getting back to the East vs West comparison, here's a family home in Hong Kong that rents for about $2,000 USD per month.

I wanted to see if I could emulate those South Koreans. I tried to study late into the night for my ISTQB exam but I didn't do very well after about 10:00PM. Now I really want to go to sleep. Damn, I must be soft.

In my country schooling starts at age 3 with two years of kindergarten, with a school-like strict curriculum - all that before elementary (at age 5).

Then they do verbal/body-language/role-playing test at the
end of each year in order to see if the kid can pass to the next year.

I was still non-verbal at the end of 1st year but I could pass everything else.

and yes, my school was from 7 AM to 5 PM + Saturday till 12 pm.
Double language teaching since day 1 (Arabic and French). English teaching starts much later.

So does that mean you had time to cover everything in class or did you still have a lot of homework?

I have this notion that if I went to an Eastern school it would have made me really badass but the truth is it probably just would have driven me crazy.

There was tons of homework, just to give you the subjects we had to study.

In French: Math, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Geology, French literature, French History (France and Europe), French language, Computing.

In Arabic: Arabic language, Arabic literature, Poetry, History (local and Middle east), Geography, Civic education.

In English: English language.

ans there were minor classes like sports, translation, and painting.

Last edited by The_Face_of_Boo on 30 Jul 2016, 9:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

You do realize you're a genius, right?

Not really, this education system has its cons:
Not only you have to get an overall above average score, but you musn't fail in 3 subjects - so even let's say you get 3 F or Ds (scoring was in numbers, but I am giving the american equivalent) but you have A++ in everything else ---> you still fail the year and you have to redo the whole year.

So the student's main concern ends up on passing everything, to study more on things he/she hates or not good at in order to pass them (10/20 = C?) while scarifying study time from things he/she loves.
So there was little time to excel in something- only really gifted students were able to get A++ in everything.

and there was a lack of lab work.