My grandparents and I : intergenerational relations between grandparents and grandchildren from the point of view of the children

This dissertation examines intergenerational relationships between grandparents and grandchildren from the child's point of view. In an effort to understand these relationships better, 36 boys and girls aged between seven and ten years were interviewed in the course of six meetings, which took place during school hours. The children interviewed came from middle and upper middle class families in the city of Porto Alegre (in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul) and belong to four different family types: nuclear, single parent, reconstituted and three-generation. This enabled intergenerational relationships to be studied in different circumstances. In this thesis, children talk about how they live in their families and about how contact with grandparents is established within the family structures under analysis. The children's biographies show the effect of divorce and remarriage on intergenerational relationships, the importance of ties established by the middle generation and a strong propensity to establish and maintain contact with the maternal family line. In their experience as grandchildren, boys and girls report moments of care, discovery, adventure and play, and their grandparents' home appears in its full relevance and uniqueness. This is an important place in the child's world, and the children show, through their knowledge, that living with grandparents contributes to the constitution of the childhood self. Intergenerational contact is revealed to be an interactive and co-educational process, which provides old and young alike with opportunities to learn and teach. Children's ties to their grandparents may be so strong that not even the latter's death can break them.