Intergenerational Kin Communication

Female callers were consistently more connected to other generations than same-age male callers. Female-to-female interactions had the highest fraction of calls to one-generation-older or one-generation-younger alters at all caller ages. The study reported that younger people did not call parents nearly as often as parents called them. Generation-gap calling was operationalized as calls to an alter approximately 20 years older or younger than the caller. The study interpreted older people calling younger generations much more than younger people called older generations as evidence that affection flows downward.