The social psychology literature largely ignores attribution patterns made by both sexes of differing generations on an activity with salience for both sexes. "Parenting" is an activity with such salience. In estimating parental success for stimulus situations involving parent-child interactions, undergraduates and their parents were virtually identical. With respect to parental failure, the data suggest that some of the gender-related attribution patterns found for other failure situations hold true, and that "generation" is an important variable to consider in analyzing attribution patterns. Parents, in contrast to their children, tended to avoid explaining parental failure in terms of disqualifying factors such as an unhappy childhood, poor health, and inadequate education. Males of both generations made substantially more use of the factor "Child's Fault" as an explanation of parental failure. Females were more inclined to explain failure in terms of bad luck than were their male counterparts. (Author/CS)