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Mentoring programs are effective only when mentors become significant adults in the lives of youth. Mentors who achieve this status provide support that helps youth develop important psychological and behavioral assets, such as self-esteem and the ability to cope, thus promoting healthy adjustment. These processes are evident in findings of an evaluation of outcomes in a Big Brothers Big Sisters of America program.
Workplaces are ideal contexts for mentoring relationships between adults and older youth. To teach the competencies required in contemporary workplaces (many of which are equally useful in other settings), mentors need to use sophisticated teaching behaviors, which the authors characterize as reflective questioning and problem solving.
Teachers are a centrally important yet often overlooked resource in the lives of youth. Teacher-student relationships, when properly harnessed, may emulate mentoring at its best. This chapter explores the teacher-student relationship and examines ways in which it can be enhanced to the benefit of youth and adults.
Schools have increasingly implemented advising programs as a means of linking students with caring adults. Although this approach is promising, its success depends on adequate funding; the full commitment of administration, staff, and parents; and a thoughtful definition of the procedures for achieving the goals.
We use Hamilton's inclusive fitness method to calculate the evolutionarily stable dispersal rate in 1- and 2-dimensional stepping-stone populations. This extends previous results by introducing a positive probability for adults to survive into the next generation and breed again. Relatedness between nearby individuals generally decreases with increasing survival, decreasing competition with kin and favouring greater dispersal rates.
We study the evolution of altruism in one- and two-dimensional stepping-stone populations with discrete overlapping generations. We find that increasing survival probability facilitates the evolution of altruism, in agreement with recent results for a patch-structured population. We allow the altruistic behaviour to affect either fecundity or survival probability. In the first case, altruism is favoured compared to a randomly interacting population, but in the second case, altruism is less likely to evolve. We consider the iterated prisoner's dilemma as a description of an altruistic interaction and compare our results with recent simulations of lattice populations.
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In today's complex society where dissolution of the nuclear family has become commonplace, grandparents are playing an increasingly significant role in the nurturing of their young grandchildren. The authors studied twelve randomly selected grandparent-headed families from the case files of a suburban child guidance clinic. Comparisons were made among the cases in terms of a number of factors, most significantly, elements of treatment including therapeutic issues, modalities and outcomes. The authors stress a multi-modal and intergenerational approach to the treatment of these families.
An exploratory, descriptive study of 37 male and 26 female subjects reporting childhood or adolescent intergenerational sexual contacts about which subjects maintained, at least in part, "positive" feelings is reported. An informal comparison group of 7 female victims of sexual abuse also participated. Subjects were administered a 21-page, 130-item questionnaire designed to explore and evaluate childhood functioning and development, the nature of the sexual experience, and its possible impact on adult life. Eight subjects also participated in subsequent in-depth telephone interviews. A wide range of characteristics and possible effects of the experiences were reported, suggesting that intergenerational sexual contacts may represent a continuum of experience rather than a unitary and discrete pathological phenomenon.
"Although the popular view is that young people are leaving home later, a closer investigation of [Australian] data from 1979 to 1995 shows that this is not entirely true. Decreases are observed in the proportion of 15-19 year old men and women living at home at least since the mid-1980s, the increase for 20-24 year old men ceased in 1990, and only 20-24 year old women show a sustained increase. If only unattached young adults are considered instead of the conventional measure, any increases are even more subdued. The overall trend seems to be that while late leavers may be leaving home later, early leavers are leaving earlier or at the same time."
Three-hundred-and-eighty-one participants (undergraduates, their parents and grandparents) completed body image (BI; current minus ideal figure ratings) and dieting attitude measures. We found the usual gender gap in BI for the undergraduates (females' BI worse than males), but not for the parents and grandparents. This was due to males' worsening BI with age; females' BI did not differ across generations. The gender gap in dieting attitudes (females more likely to diet) also narrowed with increasing age (again due to males' changing attitudes), but remained significant across generations. In all three generations, females underestimated the size of the figure males found most attractive, whereas males overestimated the analogous figure for females. Finally, we found significant inter-family correlations for BI and dieting for all groups except undergraduate females. We discuss these results within cultural and evolutionary theoretical frameworks.
To what extent should scientists, doctors and the community be constrained in their decision-making by a duty to posterity? How should we as a community balance our desire to benefit the present generation against the need not to irretrievably harm our successors? These questions are discussed with particular reference to genetic research and treatment that may have great potential for people suffering from genetic disease but may cause inherited changes in future generations, either deliberately or inadvertently. We conclude that the community should take account of the interests of its successors but this should not immobilise us in the decisions we make for the present.
BACKGROUND: We previously reported 24-fold risk (OR) of violent crime and 17-fold risk for criminal offending among adult children of homicide recidivistic offenders (HR). However, there exist neither published data on the quantitative risk for crime or violent offending among parents of violent offenders, nor data on the transmission of the increased prevalence of crime across three generations. METHODS: In this naturalistic case-control cohort study all HR subjects (G2, n = 35) were extracted from the total of 1584 homicide offenders who were convicted in Finland during 1981-1993. The criminal records and prison documents from their parents (G1, n = 68), and the matched controls (n = 136), were studied, and compared with the previously published data from their children (G3, n = 11) and the controls (n = 220). RESULTS: Among the G1 parents of HR, the odds ratio (OR) for committing any crime was 5.0 (95% CI = 1.3-23.1) but the risk for violent offending was not significantly increased (OR = 3.1, 95% CI = 0.3-37.6). The prevalence of index persons convicted for any crime (versus controls) was 13.2% (versus 2.9%) in G1 and 36.4% (versus 3.2%) in G3. Only 4.4% (versus 1.5%) of G1 index parents, as compared to 18.2% (versus 0.9%) of G3 had convictions for violent crimes. The disparity of the proportions of criminal offenders between index versus control groups had increased across generations (P = 0.0023). This was also the case with violent offenders (P = 0.0019). CONCLUSIONS: The homicide recidivistic offenders had parents with 5-fold risk for any crime but, without significant risk for violent offending. The results provide the first evidence of transmission of crime across three generations, and also of the increased risk of crime among parents of violent offenders.
Against the background of the demographic development, the question is whether an old age income security system which is based on the pay-as-you-go principle is still in accordance with the principle of intergenerational solidarity. The article examines significant dimensions of a fair distribution of income between different generations and asks for the respective implications of the German pension reform 2001. The article finishes by concluding that even an old age income security system on a private basis which is based on the capital stock system cannot prevent future cohorts of younger generations from having a higher burden.
Public and scientific discussion on the effects of an aging population is often biased: aging is primarily seen as an economic burden. Increasing contribution rates in pension schemes, health and long-term care insurance are highlighted. This paper tries to provide a more balanced view. The distinction between a cross-sectional and a longitudinal view already gives different information on distributional effects. Labeling older people as "economically inactive" is a much too narrow perspective focused on the activity on the labor market only. Other types of work are neglected such as caring for children or frail elderly as well as economic activities from wealth, consumption as well as paying taxes to finance public expenditure. The approach of "generational accounting" is also narrow, focusing on public expenditure, social insurance contributions and only some types of taxes, but not dealing with private, especially intrafamily transfers. In economic terms, a comprehensive approach is needed regarding the effect of institutions and measures on the economic situation of cohorts. The role of investment in human capital is mentioned as a decisive factor for productivity in a country. Further education and retraining of older workers is one important element. An integrative approach dealing with the different fields of activities is needed when analyzing the intergenerational as well as the intragenerational distribution. This requires an elaborated and differentiated reporting of distributional effects. This important precondition, however, does not exist in Germany.
In their "aging and society" paradigm Riley and collaborators conceptualize the ideal type of an age-integrated society in which the social segregation of different age groups is removed. They claim that in the future the life-world areas of education, work and leisure will no longer exclusively follow the triple division of the life course but will be visited repeatedly in different phases of life. Therefore, they argue, age barriers would be dissolved in many areas, which would lead to more contact and cooperation and to a greater solidarity between the generations. This conception shall be rejected as an utopia because it contradicts central functional mechanisms of modern societies; at best it might be imagined as a "reflexive modernization" of age-segregated structures. A certain distance and alienation between the generations remains a direct, though unintended product of the modernization process and cannot be reversed without welfare losses. A dialogue of generations as a societal project, therefore, implies that the functional differentiation into age groups and life stages will be accepted without referring to pre-modern idealizations of generational relationships.
During the last 20 years, there has been growing literature on the consequences of population aging. Longer life expectancies mean that current cohorts can expect to spend more years as members of a family than was the case 200 years ago. The focus of this paper is on how three lineage generations are affected by the increase of the life expectancy, especially the increase in a multi-generational family and the common life time of the family members. Using event history analysis and the data of the German Socio-economic panel, it is shown, on the basis of different birth cohorts, that both Word Wars and the period after World War II have had profound negative effects on the common life time of grandfathers and their grandchildren. But there has been only a limited influence on the life courses of grandmothers and their grandchildren. One surprising result is that grandparenthood in Germany has developed into a broader phenomenon of the 20th century -- one that arose especially for children born after World War II.