A generation is all of the people born and living at about the same time, regarded collectively. It also is "the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children." In kinship, generation is a structural term, designating the parent–child relationship. In biology, generation also means biogenesis, reproduction, and procreation.
Four generations of one family: a baby boy, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his maternal great-grandmother. (2008)
Three generations of an Eastern Orthodox priest family from Jerusalem, c. 1893
Geração à Rasca demonstration in Lisbon, 2011
The Lost Generation is the demographic cohort that reached early adulthood during World War I, and preceded the Greatest Generation. The social generation is generally defined as people born from 1883 to 1900, coming of age in either the 1900s or the 1910s. The term is also particularly used to refer to a group of American expatriate writers living in Paris during the 1920s. Gertrude Stein is credited with coining the term, and it was subsequently popularised by Ernest Hemingway, who used it in the epigraph for his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises: "You are all a lost generation." "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period.
Family in Queensland pictured at home (circa 1900)
The Child's Bath by Mary Cassatt from 1893 of a woman giving a child a wash. The link between hygiene and good health was becoming better understood in Western society by the end of the 19th century and frequent bathing had become common.
Class photo taken at a school in Sweden (1900)
Children playing with toys (c. 1890s)