Psychology Wiki
Register
Advertisement
File:Baby Mother Grandmother and Great Grandmother.jpg

An infant, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his great-grandmother. Thus there are four generations of one family in this photograph.

Generation (from the Greek γενεά), also known as procreation, is the act of producing offspring.

A generation can also be a stage or degree in a succession of natural descent as a grandfather, a father, and the father's son comprise three generations.

A generation can refer to stages of successive improvement in the development of a technology such as the internal combustion engine, or successive iterations of products with planned obsolescence, such as video game consoles or [mobile phones.

In biology, the process by which populations of organisms pass on advantageous traits from generation to generation is known as evolution.

Familial generation[]

It is important to distinguish between familial and cultural generations. A familial generation is defined as the average time between a mother's first offspring and her daughter's first offspring. The generation length is 25.2 years in the United States as of 2007[1] and 27.4 years in the United Kingdom as of 2004[2].

Cultural generation[]

A cultural generation refers to the cohort of people whose youth was shaped by a particular set of events and trends. 20th-century cultural generations are shorter than familial generations.

See also[]

External links[]

References[]

  1. U.S. Census Bureau 2007, Facts for features: Mother's Day, retrieved November 30, 2007.
  2. "More women have a late pregnancy", BBC News, December 17, 2004, retrieved November 30, 2007.
  • William Strauss and Neil Howe (1991) Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584-2069, ISBN 0-688-11912-3
This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).
Advertisement