Generativity refers to the human ability to know, individually and collectively, about the interdependence of generations and to be able to, want to, and to implement this in individual and collective action.

Families - intergenerational relations

• Frank Lettke, Andreas Lange (Hrsg.) Generationen und Familien. [Generations and Families] Frankfurt 2007.
• Andreas Lange, Wolfgang Lauterbach (Hrsg.) Kinder in Familie und Gesellschaft. [Children in Family and Society] Stuttgart 2000

• "Family" can be understood as a cultural task inherent in human nature. It arises from the necessity that children are to be cared for and educated by “elders” for several years. Therefore, to understand the family, it is appropriate to start from the primacy of intergenerational relationships. The regulation and shaping of relationships between parents and relatives are important, but subsidiary.
• Since care, nurturing and education are influenced decisively by knowledge and accumulated experience under specific living conditions, it can be assumed that for time immemorial there has been a diversity of family forms. In view of the scope of familial tasks for individual and societal development, family forms were more or less strictly standardized and disciplined, which, in turn, was and is the cause of hidden or open contradictions as well as the impetus for alternatives.
• Based on these anthropological premises, we have worked mainly on the following themes:  
  • the embeddedness of family studies in social dynamics characterized as "postmodern" (5.33)  
  • the rhetoric of propagating certain family forms and the justification of family policies (4.43, 4.44, 4.61, 5.35)
  • the analysis of parental education (4.21, 5.20)
  • the private and public organization of the relationship of adult children and their parents in daily life and specific situations, e.g. inheritance (4.31, 5.24, 5.43)
  • the paraphrasing of a "social policy for the child" and its relationship to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (5.73a)

• generational affiliations imply and refer to the attribution of individual and collectiveidentities (cf. 1.18)
• the shaping of generational relationships requires dealing with differences and ambivalences in areas of tension such as closeness vs. distance, love vs. hate, autonomy vs. dependency, innovation vs. reproduction. (4.73, 4.78)
• under today's social conditions, a new understanding of generativity is developing, namely as the human ability to know individually and collectively about the mutual dependence of generations and to consider this in one's own actions. (4.89, 4.92)
• this insight points to the necessity of dialogue between the generations and an intergenerational policy (5.75).