US journalist Roseann Lake has investigated the phenomenon of "leftover" women in China. This refers to a woman who is supposedly "too old to marry". In her research, she found that many of these women are actually rather young and provoked into a frenzy to marry by their paranoid parents. Lake wondered what gives parents such power over their children's lives in China.

In the United States these parents are called helicopter parents, because they hover over their children. China is probably the world's largest producer of helicopter parents, some of whom are actually hawks hovering over their children before suddenly swooping down to send their children into a panic.

In many societies, such parents would be cautioned or have learned in earlier years not to interfere in their children's lives. However, in China these parents are masters of manipulation and too successful at their black arts to be kept at bay. Unfortunately, such parents fail to raise their children to be mature adults. Slavish obedience in children is lauded as "filial piety", and few people dared challenge it until very recently. The writer Peng Xiaoyun has voiced her concern that Chinese society teaches filial piety without teaching "parental mercies". But such dissenting voices are few and far between and soon drowned out by the mainstream voices promoting filial piety as the bedrock of society.