Everyone needs to have access both to grandparents and grandchildren in order to be a full human being.

The remark encapsulates Margaret Mead’s long-standing emphasis on the social importance of kinship and intergenerational exchange. Read in light of her anthropological work, it argues that human flourishing is not merely individual but relational: people become “fully” human through contact with both the wisdom, memory, and care of elders and the vitality, dependence, and future-orientation represented by children. The pairing of “grandparents and grandchildren” highlights a long arc of time—past and future—suggesting that identity, moral formation, and cultural continuity are strengthened when generations are not segregated. Implicitly, it critiques modern social arrangements that isolate age groups and weaken extended-family ties.