Session: Transfer, Transition, and Passing on: Exploring the Development of Youth and Adults through Intergenerational Relationships (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

Intergenerational relationships are key to development across the lifespan. Most research has concentrated on the importance of intergenerational relationships within the context of successful youth development. Yet, the cultivation of meaningful relationships across generations also holds importance for enhancing positive outcomes among adults and the broader community. In this symposium, we present findings from interdisciplinary, cross-cultural research to highlight the importance of intergenerational relationships to those of all ages. We invoke an anthropological lens that includes prolonged research engagement, multiple forms of knowledge gathering, and attention to context to investigate and analyze intergenerational encounters from multiple perspectives.

Across presentations, we develop a theme of “passing on” knowledge and values from older to younger generations, exploring how intergenerational transfers both support and obstruct developmental outcomes. As sites of knowledge transmission and assessment, we explore intergenerational relationships as encounters through which youth and adults engage with risk, envision positive change, and attempt to understand the structural inequalities that persist from generation to generation. The first project describes the complexity of child-parent relationships in immigrant families to explore the ways in which “illegality” is passed on from undocumented parent to citizen child. Findings reveal how childhood experiences and pathways for development are invariably affected by macro-level contexts that mandate discrepant treatment and access to resources based on a parent’s undocumented status. The second project examines how Indian environmental organizers attempt to pass on their movement to the next generation. Findings show that environmentalist parents’ experiences of conflict in their relationships with older kin made them cautious about influencing their children, even though they viewed intergenerational transfer as necessary to sustain the movement. In the third project, we see the ways in which older adults transfer knowledge of their histories of displacement and vulnerability to a team of young adult researchers. Through an exploration on interactions between young-adult researchers and older-adult participants, we see how students’ assessments of living spaces bring the younger generation’s perspectives on safety and the ways the older generation maintains a home (e.g., cleanliness) into view. The final project expands current understandings of intergenerational relationships through an explicit focus on the behaviors and attitudes of older adults’ who have regular interactions with children's programs. Drawing on the concept of intergenerational shared sites, results from this project illustrate how intergenerational transfers of opportunity and inequity differentially shape outcomes in older adults.

By engaging intergenerational relationships across cultural contexts, each paper in this symposium points to opportunities and challenges for the development of healthy youth and adults. In doing so, this symposium interrogates basic assumptions about youth development by showing, for example, how the category of "youth" and norms for youth-adult interaction vary cross-culturally. Each presentation demonstrates what is at stake for encounters of “passing on,” shedding light on the ways in which intergenerational relationships can be both obstructive and supportive of health and social well-being. These differences can be important to understanding what counts as healthy development and also for recognizing the specific challenges social work faces in promoting development universally.