A friend of Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman asked: “How do you feel being 90?” He answered: “Very surprised!” No one in his family has reached this age. He thanks God for this milestone, but realize that from now on, he must count his future years in single digits. This thought does not depress him, nor does death frighten him.
Does age have compensations in those so-called “Harvest Years?” What are those compensations? Like Joshua, who rendered a positive report about the Promised Land, Haberman has some favorable things to say about this final phase of life. When he first Robert Browning’s line, “Grow old with me . . . the best is yet to be,” he questioned it as poetic license. Now, more than 20 years since his retirement at age 67, he has come to recognize six reasons to justify Robert Browning’s positive view of old age.
First is the gain of tranquility. All the important decisions have been made in earlier years. He has wrestled with his vocational choice, searched for a suitable spouse, created a home, raised children, established himself in his career and have no more need to prove himself. He has walked the walk, had his failures and successes. All the pressures have eased. He is more relaxed than ever. He take his afternoon naps; and, what a joy to find on his calendar empty pages with nothing to do.
second gain was defined by Plato more than two millennia ago: The cooling of passion. You might call it the doctrine of insignificance. If a matter is not truly significant or important, don’t fret, don’t worry, and don’t get yourself worked up. Ignore it! We get less frantic, less pushy in advanced age. He quoted Sean O’Casey wrote in his eighties: “One likes to sit back and let the world turn by itself without trying to push it.” Age does not render us indifferent to the world’s problems, to the ills of society, to the suffering and unhappiness of people around us. But the experience of a long life teaches us that not all problems can be solved; and certainly, not by ourselves. Some of our intimately personal problems have no solution. All we can and must do is endure, which we are better able to do in old age than in our younger years.
The third gain that comes with old age is what he call ‘the art of submission.’ Similar to the poetess Anne Marx learned it when undergoing cancer treatment: “The force beyond,” she wrote, “was now in charge of my fate. I have become a submitter.” There are passages in life you cannot control. You must submit, let go, accept the unalterable. If you cannot change a health, family or financial problem; change your attitude. Stop fighting. Accept what must be; and strangely, this kind of surrender to the unchangeable is conducive to peace of mind.
The fourth gift harvested in old age is liberation from the compulsion or urge of setting everyone else straight. He is no longer looking to win every argument. The intensity of your conviction is no proof that you are right. More often than before, it occurs to me that I might be wrong, that he doesn’t have all the answers. He have learned to listen more and talk less. He is less dismissive of opinions he disagree with, more willing to consider the merits of the other side. He say it marks a growth, however modest, of humility.
The fifth dividend of old age is greater appreciation and gratitude.HeI have become more attentive to old and new friends. More often than before he keep in touch with old friends and reach out to new, especially, younger people. And, at his age, that means just about everyone else. He take to heart Samuel Johnson’s remark at 75: “I look upon every day to be lost in which I do not make a new acquaintance.” In response to all the bad news in the world, he make a deliberate effort to be thankful for small favors, the courteous driver, the bank teller’s cheerful greeting, the mail carrier’s conscientiousness, the kindness of good neighbors, and my doctor’s unfailingly prompt response to his call. He have discovered the truth of the opening words of Psalm 92: “It is good to give thanks.” Giving thanks is the most effective and harmless mood-changer – the best antidote to cynicism and pessimism. Earlier in life, with many years to look forward to, he felt like a millionaire in time, freely spending and wasting it. Now, that his supply of time has shrunk, he appreciate far more each day, each hour, every bit of new knowledge and every moment with people he care for.
The sixth and most important gain is more involvement with three generations of his family –children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Best of all is his love affair with a married woman – Maxine, his wife; and, his severest critic and yet, unfailing support in almost sixty-five years of marriage. What a blessing to be together each day. He say of Maxine, as did Akiba about his beloved Rachel: “mah ani, shelah” – “Whatever I am, I owe to her.”
How do organizations attract great staff, keep them, and ensure they are working at their best? This is the human resource department’s perennial challenge. And with more employees combining work and family, the challenge to help working parents perform at their optimum is even greater.
‘Work family balance’ has been proposed as the answer for working parents to better manage their work and family responsibilities. If working parents can somehow achieve ’balance’ between work and family then parents, children and organizations will benefit. But Australian working parents report feeling rushed for time, having work interfere with family time, and guilt.
So is work family balance really working? Parent Wellbeing argue that the concept of ‘work family balance’ is misconceived. Work family balance suggests that people have a fixed and limited amount of time and energy. If work is taking all that time and energy, then family suffers, or vice versa. But work family research, and the experience of working parents, suggests this is not how work and family issues typically function.
Instead working parents and organizations need a new way of thinking about work and family. This new approach must:
Understand the interrelationships and interconnections between work and family.
Recognize that work offers benefits to family life.
Acknowledge that family life offers benefits to the workplace.
Recognize that ‘well’ parents are more productive and effective at work, and care better for their children.
Parent Wellbeing propose a new understanding of work and family - Work Family Flow. Work Family Flow is about optimizing people’s work family experience to enhance parents’ wellbeing, children’s wellbeing and organizational success. By helping parents improve their wellbeing, Work Family Flow helps organizations improve their bottom line.
The paper proposes a return to a progressive individual based income tax and universal family payments for dependent children, for reasons of both fairness and efficiency, and argues for the elimination of policy instruments that create complexity and serve only to reduce the transparency of tax reform.
In the early 1980’s Australia had a highly progressive, individual based income tax and families received support for dependent children in the form of universal family allowances. The introduction of income tests for child support payments based on family income (now in the form of Family Tax Benefit Part A), together with changes in the rate scale applying to personal income, have had the effect of replacing Australia’s progressive individual based income tax with a system that tends towards one of joint taxation under a rate scale that exhibits an inverted U-shaped profile - the highest marginal rates apply to average incomes, and to the incomes of the second earner in the family. This paper shows how the introduction of this new income tax system has shifted the overall burden of taxation towards families with two-earners on low and average wages and to working married mothers in particular as second earners.
Great news for all my LGBT fellow. Vermont becomes the fourth state to legalize marriages of gay and lesbian couples and the first to do so with a legislature’s vote. The others are Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa.
- Posted by e2 on 03.22.09
- Tags Family Changes, Modern Family
Although the American ideology of the family has a nuclear ideal, research suggests that American families rely upon extended family support to raise children. This study explores how transfers of money, time, and space (i.e. coresidence) from extended family members support children and their immediate families, given the needs and constraints of the family members (children, parents, grandparents) involved.
Analyses in this study use nationally representative data about children and their families from the 1997 Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its accompanying Child Development Supplement.
Consistent with ideas drawn from social exchange theory and the life course perspective, this study finds that the high needs of children and their immediate families are associated with the transfer of resources from extended family members.
The needs of children’s immediate families (low family incomes, young mothers, one or no parents present in the household, caregivers employed part-time, government program participation) are particularly important for such transfers, more so than the needs of the children themselves, or the constraints of coresidential grandparents.
Considering the overall package of support children receive from extended family members, money, time, and coresidence all reflect different responses to need.
Coresidence in a grandparent-headed household is the transfer of support most linked to the high needs of children and their immediate families. Grandparents who share their housing with their grandchildren also face considerable constraints themselves.
Money transfers are likeliest when children and their families have high needs for such support, but, the greatest amounts of money are transferred to children and families who have relatively low needs for resources.
Finally, time transfers reflect considerable variation in extended family and grandparent involvement. While children and families with employment demands and child care needs are more likely to have grandparents and other extended family members serving as caregivers, other children spend time with grandparents and other extended family members, regardless of need. Time transfers may reflect a desire of grandparents and other extended family members to invest in the social capital of a family, and suggest that non-need based factors may be important for transfers of time to non-coresidential children.
A friend of Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman asked: “How do you feel being 90?” He answered: “Very surprised!” No one in his family has reached this age. He thanks God for this milestone, but realize that from now on, he must count his future years in single digits. This thought does not depress him, nor does death frighten him. 
