The author deals with the issue of family relationships and the exchange of help and support within a family. She analyses the development of theoretical studies of this problem in Western sociology in the past ten years. The article is linked to a previous article the author published in the Czech Sociological Review in 1996, in which she summarised the preceding decade. This time the article is not conceived as a 'classical' survey, but instead the author deliberately selects and presents the approaches, perspectives, theories and concepts of relational support in order to identify the main feature of theoretical development in the given period, which in the author's opinion is a tendency to try to overcome the still strong influence of the theory of structural functionalism and its normative concept of relationships between family generations. The logical framework of the analysis is formed by a confrontation between the model of intergenerational solidarity and the alternative concept of ambivalence that is currently asserting itself. In the article the author also refers to the results of her empirical research and links them to the concept of ambivalence in relation to interpretative sociology.