Concluding Reflections

Abstract

This book has examined employment and care in families with four surviving generations. Its lens has been generational relations: the transmission of these and other resources between family generations and generational cohorts. It has been about what it means to be a mother or a father in the workforce in different periods of the 20th century when very different mores governing gender roles and childrearing. It is also about care as it is provided and experienced in multi-generation families: being a child of one’s parents, being a parent, a grandparent and a great-grandparent. Care is however only one resource among many which are transmitted intergenerationally and cannot be divorced from material resources and from social and cultural capital. Writing this book has therefore been a challenge because it encompasses so much of human life.