Sunday, March 5 is Grandmother’s Day. 36 years of celebrating. The opportunity to wonder about the links that unite generations Y and Z today. Generation Y born between 1980 and 2000, and generation Z, born from the year 2000.
On the occasion of Grandmother’s Day, sociologist Jean Viard’s view of the links between generations and their current evolution. We have been celebrating Grandmother’s Day for 36 years. What are the links that today unite Generations Z and Y with their grandparents? We are talking about 20/40 year olds, against a backdrop of climate and economic crisis, questions about identity.
franceinfo: We have the feeling that there is a break, reproaches between these generations. Is this something that we have already observed in our history?
John Viard: I will be less radical than you. In addition, we have our first child at 30 years and 9 months. There is also that the generations have changed a lot. We have a very, very long youth, and then afterwards, we have children, and the grandparents do half of the call duty. They keep the grandchildren, almost, as much as the tatas. So, you have to see that there is enormous solidarity when the child appears. Then, there is another solidarity, when one is really very, very old. So that’s why I’m more careful than you.
Me, I lived the period of 68. The differences were gigantic. It was the power of the father over the wife, and over the family. It was the power of the president, it was the power of the boss. We were in extremely hierarchical societies, and the cultural gaps were huge. At the time of the arrival of the pill, for example, the differences in behavior were gigantic. So let’s be careful. I think that the generations are much closer, that they communicate much more, especially through women and girls, and that we are much more complicit with our children.
Afterwards, there is a second question, it is indeed the climate crisis. Is there anyone at fault, because obviously we have disrupted nature, and inevitably, it has been disrupted by the work of previous generations. There are different points of view here. Personally, my point of view is that the industrial revolution was a significant historic moment in human consciousness and human hope. We almost doubled our life expectancy. We are much less sick, we travel, mothers have the number of babies they want, etc.
Me, as a sociologist, my indicator is as long as life increases and mothers have the number of children they want, it’s a society that works well. But, it’s true that there are consequences that we didn’t know about, or that we underestimated, because the romantics, already in the 19th century, were worried about predation on nature. But there are consequences. The real question is: we have a climate war to wage, which will mobilize one or two generations. A gigantic war not only to protect ourselves from global warming, but above all to regain control of nature.
What is happening is that nature has taken over history. For 150 years, it has been men who have made history with the industrial revolution, new techniques, nuclear power, cars, pollution, etc. We built a society of progress, and afterwards, we argued over how progress was divided between capital and labour, worker and boss, to give the image of Epinal.
Today, it is no longer us who make history, it is nature. Global warming, fires, the speed of global warming. He’s the man who started the furnace, so to speak, and now there’s a conflagration that can’t be held. We’re going to take over.
Precisely on this question, there is a real difference in approach, on this subject between generations…
It’s hard to say that, you know, because old people are very close to their grandchildren. And basically, it is these grandchildren who will experience the climate crisis the most. So that young people have a different form of anxiety, when 37% of young graduate girls say they don’t want to have children, it shows that they have the impression of being faced with a wall. There are others, it is the great replacement, their anguish.
So, there are two great anxieties: great warming, great replacement. The great replacement is more of a myth, but hey. While previous generations did not experience this. I have never been worried about unemployment and I have been unemployed twice. But it didn’t matter, it wasn’t anxiety. We never calculated how many children we had in relation to the climate, etc.
The stakes have changed, that’s true. But afterwards, are the families united? I think families stick together. You know, there are 17 billion euros that pass every year, from grandparents to grandchildren. So we are in a society where monetary issues, issues of solidarity and indeed the issue of the climate battle are mobilizing everyone. And I think that the great pandemic has brought families a lot closer, and that the challenge is not to say: it’s your fault, it’s to say, how we are going to win the battle together.