Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to present a problem with respect to the theory of the three-generation family. It seems to the present writer that most of Japanese family socilogists lay stress on the study of the ie system and overlooks the problem of the internal structure of this family.
However, according to intensive research we made of the urban families in Hokkaido by comparing them in two types- the independent enterpriser's family and the employee's family, many of them have been organized under the different social and cultural conditions from the ie system. Their characteristics are follows.
1) In the formation of the three-generation families, they do not always keep continuity from the father to the eldest son and his immediate family. It is not rare especially in the employee's family that married children who have been apart from their parents are living with them now.
2) Some of the independent enterpriser of shop and factory succeed to their father's property and business. But the employee's family does not so. In the latter, internal needes for mutual aid between parent's family and children's family are main motives of the formation of the three-generattn family. Examples: an old woman lives within her son's family because she needs the economic and emotional maintence after death of her spouse, and an old couple who is living with their second son's family and help in taking partial charge of the household care temporarily.
3) Status and role of the head of the independent enterpriser's family are rather integrated. On the contrary, the employee's family consists of two families, children's family and parent's family, and therefore role of this family head is not integrated.
4) There is a kind of regularity in the dynamic process of the composition and separation of children's family and parent's family especially in the case of the employee's family. There are many old people who need the emotional maintenance in a certain period of time on one hand. On the other hand, children's family often acquires a parent's aid especially when young wife goes outside the home to work. Parent's needs sometimes coincide with children's needs and some people try to satisfy such needs in living together. A well-timed separation of these families before they live in the same house has a good effect on the internal family relations.
Consequently, we can divide the three-generation family into two types, independent enterpriser's family and employee's family, and according to the process of their composition, minor classifications are possible.
Indeed, in our society, modernization of the family seems to facilitate the increase of the nuclear family. However, the most essential problem for the family sociologists is not whether the three-generation family will continue to exist or not, but how to observe and analyse the interrelations between children's family and parent's family as they are. Here, the three-generation family offers us the most appropriate material as to this problem.
