I N recent years, both researchers and policy makers have turned their attention to relations between the generations after children reach adulthood. New demographic realities have spurred this trend: Increases in longevity have greatly lengthened the shared lifetimes of generations, and many people can look forward to continued relationships with their parents until well into the children’s middle age. As research on intergenerational relationships has burgeoned across the social sciences, there has been concern that new conceptual approaches are needed. Given the rapidly changing and sometimes confusing nature of intergenerational relations in contemporary Western societies, it is probably not surprising that a common thread among emerging models is the concept of complexity. This movement is both necessary and predictable in our field. In a classic article, the noted scientist and educator Warren Weaver described the key progression in the history of science as a movement from simpler models to more complex ones. In the early stages of a field, concern is with straightforward questions of categorization, description, and relatively simple hypotheses, whereas as the discipline progresses, the organized complexity of systems is acknowledged and investigated (Weaver, 1948). It is clear that such a movement is under way in the scientific study of intergenerational relations among adults. Scholars from a variety of disciplines are moving beyond simple models to orientations and approaches that recognize the complex and sometimes contradictory world of parent–adult child relationships. A recent article by Russell Ward (2008) is an outstanding example of how social scientists interested in the family in later life can take the complexity of relationships into account and shed new light on old questions. In this innovative and thoughtprovoking piece, Ward tackles two types of complexity. First, rather than taking a traditional unidirectional focus on closeness and attachment or tension and conflict, the article focuses on ambivalence—although, as we discuss shortly, not as usually defined. Second, instead of examining a single parent–child relationship, the research investigates how parents’ relationships with multiple children within the same family differ. Ward further gives attention to gender differences throughout the analyses, an approach that is often recommended but not frequently accomplished, given that many studies focus solely on mothers. For these reasons, we believe this article makes a substantial contribution to the literature. However, as is perhaps appropriate in this context, we find ourselves ambivalent about Ward’s approach. On the one hand, we applaud the effort to take complexity into consideration, exploiting a well-established data set in creative new ways. On the other hand, the article raises questions regarding the operationalization and measurement of ambivalence that are somewhat perplexing. These issues are worthy of discussion and debate, and they alert us to definitional concerns about intergenerational ambivalence that need to be untangled by future investigations. We find Ward to be entirely convincing in showing the benefits of obtaining reports on multiple children within the same family. He begins by noting an apparent contradiction in the study of older parent–adult child relations. It is clear family ties play an increasingly salient role as people grow older and that intergenerational relationships can be strong sources of support and fulfillment. However, there is less than convincing evidence from research thus far regarding the effect of relationships with children on parents’ well-being. Ward argues that one way to shed light on this issue is to take into account ‘‘multiple relations’’ between parents and all of their children. In contrast to most previous research, which has focused on a single parent–child dyad in each family or asked about adult children in the aggregate, Ward takes the critically important step of examining how parents differentiate among children in the same family. The clear payoff, as Ward notes, is a ‘‘more complete view of parent–child relations.’’ By including all children, Ward is able to identify families in which there is at least one child with whom relationship quality is low. In what may be analogous to the maxim ‘‘You are only as happy as your unhappiest child,’’ having one child in the sibship with whom the relationship is poor appears to trump other, more positive relationships. The innovative analysis in this article clearly provides critically important detail lacking in other research. We encountered difficulties, however, in Ward’s conceptualization and measurement of ambivalence. Ward introduces the concept of ‘‘collective ambivalence,’’ for which there is, to Journal of Gerontology: SOCIAL SCIENCES Copyright 2008 by The Gerontological Society of America 2008, Vol. 63B, No. 6, S394–S396