Based on the data obtained through an empirical study, the paper analyses the place and role of grandmothers in the system of intra-family relations in modern Russia. This survey was a part of the international research project “The value of children and intergenerational relationships”, the Russian part of which was conducted by the team representing the Department of General Sociology and Social Work at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod. 100 maternal grandmothers with teenage grandchildren sharing the same households were interviewed. The average age of the respondents was 68 years.
The paper discovered that grandmothers badly needed being paid attention to by their relatives while their main mission was to maintain intra-family harmony, often at the cost
of their own interests. In 20 % of cases, they demonstrated features of controlling behavior, a tendency to dominate and overestimate the importance of their own experience for subse-quent generations. The approach made it possible to reveal the emotional-psychological and utilitarian basis of relations between grandmothers and their grandchildren, the predominance of altruistic intentions in respondents-to-daughters relations, general collectivist orientation in their interaction with the social environment. The limitations in interpreting these data are caused by internal heterogeneity of grandmothers as a social group and the requirements im-posed by the methodology used which affected the make-up of the sampling.
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