Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of intergenerational relationships for personal fulfillment.
Margaret Mead suggests that having connections with both grandparents and grandchildren is essential for a person's emotional and social well-being. These relationships provide individuals with a sense of continuity, heritage, and purpose, enriching their lives and leading to a more complete human experience.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of family values, this quote can highlight the need for intergenerational bonds.
Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space.
Prayer does not use up artificial energy, doesn't burn up any fossil fuel, doesn't pollute. Neither does song, neither does love, neither does the dance.
Instead of being presented with stereotypes by age, sex, color, class, or religion, children must have the opportunity to learn that within each range, some people are loathsome and some are delightful.
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
EARTH DAY uses one of humanity's great discoveries, the discovery of anniversaries by which, throughout time, human beings have kept their sorrows and their joys, their victories, their revelations and their obligations alive, for re-celebration and re-dedication another year, another decade, another century, another eon.
American society is very like a fish society. . . . Among certain species of fish, the only thing which determines order of dominance is length of time in the fishbowl. The oldest resident picks on the newest resident, and if the newest resident is removed to a new bowl, he, as oldest resident, will pick on the newcomers.
Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out.
My father wasn't a cruel man. And I loved him. But he was a pretty tough character. His own father was even tougher - one of those Victorians, hard as iron - but my dad was tough enough.
It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality.
I've decided to tell my kids things like: 'I love the way each of you tilted back your heads when you laughed.' I will give them specific stuff they can grasp.
She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.
I grew up one of six children with working-class parents in the Deep South. My mother was a college librarian, and my father worked in a shipyard. I never saw them balance a checkbook, but they kept a roof over our heads and got all six of us into college.
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