Little Emperor Syndrome

Little emperor syndrome, or the little emperor effect, describes an aspect of the People's Republic of China's one-child policy in which children of modern upper-class and wealthier Chinese families receive seemingly excessive amounts of attention from parents and grandparents, compounded by the family's greater spending power and parents' desire to give their child benefits they themselves were denied. The British journalist Andrew Marshall has argued the phenomenon is shaping modern Chinese society in unexpected ways that may culminate in a future behavioral time bomb. Little emperors were primarily an urban phenomenon, since the one-child policy generally applied only to urban communities, and rural, labor-dependent families remained largely unaffected.