First, I will discuss only research and writing on American families, although a great deal of important work has been done recently on family life elsewhere in the world. Second, my comments will focus on one major aspect of the family life of older people -- their relations with their children and, to a lesser extent, with their grandchildren. Intergenerational relations certainly are the most widely discussed and debated aspect of the family life of the elderly, and many observers would argue that they constitute the most problematic aspect. Furthermore, several recent trends will be discussed that have the potential to alter intergenerational relations in significant ways. Thus, I will restrict my attention to intergenerational relations. This restriction also means that not much will be said about the one out of five noninstitutionalized older persons who do not have living children ( Shanas, 1980). Finally, I will be unable to consider a great deal of valuable recent research that is not directly related to my theme. This is not, then, an attempt to assemble a comprehensive bibliography of recent work on aging and the family; rather, it is an attempt to illuminate what is, in my judgment, the most useful and exciting direction in recent scholarship.

What has been the long-term trend in the relations between older Americans and their children? To this question, most scholars until very recently would have responded quite simply and emphatically that family relations have deteriorated. The conventional wisdom among commentators has been that the position of the aged was most advantageous in the preindustrial era and that the coming of industrialization and urbanization resulted in a slow, steady decline. Once powerful, revered, and integrated into family and society, according to this view, the aged are now powerless, scorned, and isolated. In the past two decades, to be sure, a number of social scientists have produced evidence that the aged are not nearly as cut off from kin as prevailing beliefs suggested. Yet even these revisionist scholars were helpless to combat the argument that, however serviceable intergenerational ties are today, the family life of the aged was far superior in olden days. The revisionist social scientists were helpless because there had been almost no historical research on old age in America, and thus the prevailing view was as difficult to refute as it was to prove. . .

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