Divorce rate rises for young couples

The divorce rate of young local couples is rising as parents are taking an increasingly active role in their children's marriages, local media reported Monday.

Roughly 25 percent of all divorce cases in the city's district courts involve couples born in the 1980s, according to a report in Labor Daily. And that number has been rising at an annual rate of about 10 percent in recent years.

"For us, the rate is even higher," said Zhao Bingqing, a Huangpu District People's Court judge. "More than half of our divorce cases are brought by couples born in the 1980s, most of whom are the only child in their families and have received a lot of attention from their parents."

Local men and women of this generation are particularly vulnerable to parental meddling, Zhao said.

She told the story of one case she presided over that involved college sweethearts who married soon after graduation in 2010. Both the husband and wife worked in multinational companies and made decent salaries.

Not too long into their marriage, the husband, surnamed Zhang, noticed that his wife was coming home later and later each night, Zhao said. He told his father about the issue. Zhang's father was an experienced police officer and he used his authority to examine the check-in records at several local hotels.

Zhao said the father eventually found information that showed his daughter-in-law had stayed in a room with another man. When confronted, Zhang's wife pled for another chance and refused to leave their apartment, so Zhang's father moved in. By April 2011, he had pushed the couple apart.

"Because Zhang's parents paid the mortgage on the couple's apartment and spent hundreds of thousands of yuan on their wedding, they felt they had the right to take care of their son's marriage," Zhao told the Global Times.

Many parents in Shanghai share the sentiment, said Shu Xin, director of the China Marriage and Family Consulting Research Center, a social group that is affiliated with the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

"Parents feel they have more say in their children's marriage because they bear so much responsibility for them," Shu told the Global Times.　

After the one-child policy was instituted in 1980, parents have spoiled their children, Shu said. They arrange their weddings and help bring up their children, all of which costs a lot of money in a metropolis like Shanghai. "As long as young men and women remain financially dependent on their parents, such cases will not be uncommon," Shu said.