Why do the chinese and the japanese have such respect for family life?

Cause that’s how they were raised to repect their elders and it’s part of their culture.

It’s ingrained in culture and tradition. It’s in other cultures too, just not quite so much in the States.

@fedupwitcaddys: WTF?

Because they know what it means to be poor without anything and how hard it is and feel blessed to have someone at least and their culture demands respect for one another , you can see same deal in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland.

In China they restrict parents to one child. How does that support family life?

In Japan the wife and children must obey the wishes of the man of the house. There is no choice. It is do what he says or you are banished. Depending on the birth order and the sex of the children what each is required to do is firmly spelled out by tradition. My husband is the second son so he had to do all the heavy lifting. His brother, the first born, was given much more leeway as long as he did well in school and married who they told him to marry. It is more like the Army than it is like what many Americans consider supporting family life.

There is a huge cultural difference that has be studied and documented.
It is generally called individualistic culture vs. collectivist culture.
America is an individualistic culture which means we place more value on the individual than the group.
Japanese, and many other cultures, are collectivist meaning they place more value on the group than the individual.
In both there is medium ground this is just a simplification.

@RedPowerLady That is a very good answer. One example can be seen when eating dinner. In Japan and China, the family shares dinner——although each individual has his/her own bowl of rice, all the other courses on the table are shared. Not so in most Western cultures, where each person has his/her own dish with everything put on it. In Chinese and Japanese families too, money is often shared among the family members. My money is your money and so forth. The idea of “me owing my Mom money or my Dad owing me money” is unheard of. The communal bath in Japan is another example of sharing. Sharing promotes closeness and bonding, and this is evident in most Asian cultures. Add that to centuries’ old traditions of respecting the elderly, filial piety, strict gender roles, the importance of the family surname, and Confucianism, and you got very family-oriented Chinese and Japanese families.