"Let's Protect Our Grandparents, Help Our Neighbours ...". Intergenerational Relations During The Covid 19 Pandemic

In the period of social isolation during the COVID 19 pandemic, many people became more aware that some phenomena in our society do not work well enough. Problems that are "silently present" have become more obvious. In the media and public discourse, the debate on the situation of seniors as one of the most vulnerable groups has often come to the fore, prompting us to reflect on several ethical dilemmas. In this paper I will address the issue of unifying and simplifying the perception of a group of seniors as a single mass: for example, in the field of intergenerational communication using modern technologies in connection with digital inequality, in the field of institutional care for the seniors often based on high-capacity facilities, ageism on various levels, as well as forms of intergenerational assistance within the family and relatives. The paper is based on data obtained from an online questionnaire survey on everyday life during the coronavirus epidemic in Slovakia shortly after the first emergency measures were introduced in March 2020. The aim was to map people's attitudes and immediate reflections by answering (especially) open-ended questions without pre-defined limitations. We were interested in what the respondents themselves would highlight in the individual answers, how they would describe their current everyday life, especially in the context of the issues of intergenerational relations, division of labour, communication and cooperation between family members and kinship. We supplemented the pilot survey with data obtained from diary entries from the time of the epidemic.