Children and parents' social characteristics and intergenerational relations It has been demonstrated that both children's and parents' social characteristics are crucial to an understanding of intergenerational relations. Three social characteristics play a particularly important role in determining the quality of parent-child relations in later life: age, gender, and race. Age Theories of adult development and intergenerational relations suggest that the age of the adult child affects the quality of parent-child relations. These theories argue that as adult children become older, there read more









