Tell me if you’ve heard this one before  – a grandmother is talking about her grandchildren, how she loves to spend time with them, how they are the light of her life. Then she adds with a smile: “And anytime I want, I can go home and leave them to their mother.”
The modern grandma —..Read the rest…

We continue with our series on what the multigenerational family can learn from the vast amount of recent research on the intergenerational workplace.
Teamwork would seem a simple idea to most people and it is. Unfortunately what you mean by teamwork and what I think it means might well be completely different. Even when everyone is..Read the rest…

We’ve been reading a lot about managing intergenerational conflict in the workplace. It seems like that has become a real management issue in the past ten years. We had to ask ourselves if the business management people might have uncovered some insights into managing conflict in the multigenerational family.
When we first approached the business literature..Read the rest…

In the glossary of loaded words, obligation certainly ranks right up there. Partially because human nature suggests that we do things for others for altruistic reasons. For family members we act in their best interest out of love not because we are obligated, at least that is how we like to see ourselves. Which is..Read the rest…

Ask most multigenerational family members how their own multi-gen situation began and you will probably get the identical “family answer.” Whether it was an illness, job loss, economics –whatever, everyone knows what was the genesis of their extended family situation. Within that story lies a potential trap for the multigenerational family. We need to be..Read the rest…