In the context of massive rural-urban migration, changing intergenerational relations have an important impact on welfare of family members of rural migrant workers. Typological methods provide a useful tool to depict complex and diverse family relations, yet there are few typological studies on diversity of intergenerational relations in Chinese rural migrant workers’ families. Using data from a survey of rural migrant workers in Shenzhen in 2013, this paper, employing latent class analysis, reveals four types of intergenerational relations in rural migrant workers’ families: tight-knit, near but emotionally-detached, distant but emotionally-close, and detached ties. The tight-knit tie, which is characteristic of the traditional extended family and of strong cohesion, is the most common type in rural migrant workers’ families, but it has been deeply branded with the mark of urbanization, reflecting continuation and change of traditional rural family relations. The distant but emotionally-close tie reflects the effort of out-migrant children who support their parents over a long distance, with parent-child emotion growing into an important new bond maintaining intergenerational family relations.

Using survey data of rural migrant workers in Shenzhen in 2005,this paper analyzes effects of social networks on rural migrant workers’ attitudes towards pre-marital pregnancy and extra-marital sexual behaviors.The results show that social networks is the key approach to change their marriage and sex attitudes,and number and attitudes of network members have significant effects on their attitudes towards pre-marital pregnancy and extra-marital sexual behaviors.The better the rural migrants integrate to the urban society,the closer their attitudes to those of permanent urban residents.Compared with male rural migrants,female rural migrants are less likely to accept pre-marital pregnancy and extra-marital sexual behaviors.Modernization of their marriage and sex attitudes helps their social integration into the urban society in terms of culture and value but might stimulate the occurrence of pre-marital pregnancy and extra-marital sexual behaviors.