THE PERIOD OF LIFE WHICH FAMILY GENERATIO NS SPEND TOGETHER

In modern societies the generational structure of families has changed greatly. One of the most obvious characteristics of this is the chang e in the period of life that vertical family generations spend togethe r. This is plausible considering that the increase in life expectancy, the delay in the time at which children are born, the effects of both world wars, and class membership strongly affect the overlapping of t he life courses of members of different generations. On the basis of t hese factors, the following study deals with the question of what effe cts the above-mentioned factors have on the shared live courses of two - and three-family generations. Using event history analysis and the d ata of the German Socio-Economic Panel, on the basis of six different birth cohorts it is shown that both world wars and the period after Wo rld War II have had profoundly negative effects on the shared life cou rses of fathers and their children. In contrast, the life expectancies of mothers have been only insignificantly affected by the events of t he two world wars. As concerns the overlapping of the life courses of grandchildren and their grandparents, the surprising result was establ ished that only after the Second World War did grandparenthood become common in Germany. The low life expectancies and the consequences of b oth world wars as well as of the postwar period had the result that ma ny children born after the Second World War hardly knew their grandfat hers. In contrast, grandmothers were much more strongly present. The r esults pertaining to the shared live courses of two and three generati ons suggest that women are strongly overrepresented in family generati ons. For grandchildren this means, for example, that to an ever increa sing degree they grow up in a family context surrounded by adults, and particularly by women.