Why are many parent-child relationships in Chinese families filled with a sense of sacrifice? Parents always want to leave the best things for their children, and they also stress phrases like “You eat; I don’t like to,” “It’s all for you,” and even deliberately show how frugal they are and what they’ve given up. On the surface, it looks like they’re expressing love, but in reality it conveys a relationship pattern of “your gains are built on my sacrifices.” Its roots do not come entirely from personal personality; instead, they stem from a family system and cultural traditions formed in long-term environments of resource scarcity. In agricultural societies and during development, ordinary families with insufficient resources need to concentrate those resources to nurture the next generation, and parental sacrifice paired with children’s success becomes an effective survival strategy. Over time, sacrifice shifts from a means into a virtue, and love gradually becomes tied to giving, endurance, and self-suppression. Ultimately, a unique cultural logic takes shape: parents prove their love through sacrifice, and children repay that love through gratitude. This is also the deeper reason why, in many Chinese families, the emotional dimension of “favor and gratitude” carries more weight than “boundary sense.”