[Anomie in the multigenerational family: children and the care of their elderly parents].

When one of the older parents starts to require intensive and lasting care, to a certain extent an anomic situation will arise in the older family, between children and parents as well as between the children themselves. There is some kind of ambivalence between the generations within the kinship system, which can also be shown historically. It is possible that this ambivalence may even be enlarged by recent structural and cultural developments within the kinship system. Based on a family crisis model a lack of clarity within the older family is shown as to the expectations and obligations to each other. The spiral of the failing competence of the family to handle the care question mostly has its roots in the anomic situation surrounding the organisation of the care activities. To support our anomy hypothesis some problems in taking care of the older parents are analyzed; how they are looked at and handled by the children and how they are negotiated by the parents. Open interviews and some cases are the basis for this analysis and some conclusions in handling the anomic situation are presented.