Middle Age: Vocational and Family Adjustments
Adjustments in Middle Age
Vocational and Personal Adjustments
Adjustments related to work, personal life, and social interactions are more challenging in middle age compared to earlier stages.
Maintaining a comfortable standard of living becomes increasingly difficult due to automation and company mergers, leading to job losses.
Many middle-aged individuals find their skills and experience are no longer relevant, forcing them into unemployment.
Family Life Adjustments
Adjusting to the role of adviser to grown children after years of direct supervision is difficult, especially when financial support is needed for early marriage or extended education.
Relating to spouses as individuals, rather than co-parents, can be challenging after years of raising children, adding stress and hindering personal and social adjustments.
Issues such as singlehood, divorce, and widowhood can disrupt personal and social lives, complicating necessary adjustments.
Caring for aged parents can be a significant burden, especially when combined with personal, vocational, and social adjustments.
Work-related problems are often most pressing for men, while family relationship issues are harder for women to manage, particularly for those balancing jobs and home responsibilities.
Adjusting to impending old age is a novel and often difficult challenge, leading to emotional tension.
Vocational Adjustments
Historically, fewer people lived to middle age and remained vocationally active; changes in work conditions were slower and less impactful.
Since World War II, the workforce has seen significant changes affecting middle-aged workers; million were working in 1972, with an estimated million by 1990.
Radical changes in American life have complicated vocational adjustments, as outlined in Box 12-1.
Unfavorable Social Attitudes
Older workers are often perceived as resistant to learning new skills, unable to keep up with modern demands, uncooperative, and prone to absenteeism and accidents due to declining health.
Hiring Policies
Employers often prefer hiring and training younger workers due to beliefs about productivity and retirement pension costs, making job changes more difficult for middle-aged individuals.
Increased Use of Automation
Automation requires higher intelligence, more training, and greater speed, negatively impacting middle-aged workers with limited training or health issues.
Group Work
Younger workers often have better social adjustment skills due to modern training methods, enabling them to get along better with superiors and coworkers compared to middle-aged workers.
Role of the Wife
As men become more successful, wives are expected to support their business endeavors, be assets at social functions, and participate in community affairs.
Compulsory Retirement
Mandatory retirement in the mid-to-late sixties reduces promotion opportunities after fifty and makes finding new jobs at the same level difficult.
Dominance of Big Business
Middle-aged workers in small businesses acquired by larger corporations may find their positions eliminated or downgraded.
Relocation
Consolidation of businesses can force workers to relocate, which is more challenging for middle-aged individuals and their families.
Sex Differences in Vocational Adjustment
Vocational adjustment problems now affect both men and women as more women enter the workforce.
Men typically reach their peak vocational success in their forties and early fifties, with higher status and income.
Middle-aged men are generally more satisfied with their jobs due to better positions compared to their younger years.
Some men seek more fulfilling jobs or change careers due to dissatisfaction, restlessness, or the realization that it is now or never, with vocational instability common in the early forties.
As more women enter professions, business, and industry, their adjustment problems increase, including issues related to equal opportunities in hiring, promotion, and salary.
Women often derive less satisfaction from work and have less desire to remain in or seek new jobs, sometimes leading to mid-life career changes requiring retraining.
Factors Influencing Vocational Adjustment in Middle Age (Box 12-2)
Satisfaction with Work
Those who enjoy their work make better adjustments than those who feel trapped in disliked jobs due to past responsibilities.
Opportunities for Promotion
Chances for promotion decrease with age, negatively affecting vocational adjustments.
Vocational Expectations
Workers assess their achievements against earlier aspirations, influencing vocational adjustments.
Increased Use of Automation
Automation can cause boredom, job insecurity, increased speed requirements, and reluctance to retrain, hindering vocational adjustment.
Attitude of Spouse
Spousal dissatisfaction with work status, pay, or work-related absences can affect job satisfaction.
Attitude toward "Big Business"
Pride in working for prestigious companies improves work adjustments.
Attitudes toward Coworkers
Positive relationships with superiors, subordinates, and coworkers improve attitudes toward work.
Relocation
Feelings about relocation for job retention or promotion influence vocational adjustments.
Assessment of Vocational Adjustment
Vocational adjustment is assessed by success in work and satisfaction derived from it.
Achievements
Some workers achieve desired income, prestige, authority, and autonomy, while others find themselves in less rewarding jobs.
Some may see themselves as failures despite maximizing their abilities due to unmet aspirations.
Women often fail to achieve their potential due to prejudice, regardless of ability and training.
Satisfaction
The forties are a "critical age" for job satisfaction, followed by a decline in the late fifties and early sixties.
Satisfaction drops about five years before retirement due to perceived limited advancement opportunities.
Job satisfaction decreases due to the pressures of work as a result of aging, fatigue, and resentment towards younger workers.
Women may derive less satisfaction and face resentment due to unequal opportunities, compounded by similar issues for minority group members.
High job satisfaction leads to maintaining work standards, loyalty, boosting morale, and minimizing complaints.
Conditions Contributing to Vocational Satisfaction in Middle Age (Box 12-3)
Achievement of vocational goals.
Family satisfaction with vocational achievements.
Opportunities for self-actualization.
Congenial relationships with coworkers.
Satisfaction with management and superiors.
Satisfaction with provisions for illness, vacations, disability, retirement, and fringe benefits.
Feelings of job security.
Avoiding forced relocation.
Adjustment to Changed Family Patterns
Family life changes significantly as children leave home, leaving husband and wife as the primary unit.
This transition is more difficult for women, who often center their lives around home and family.
During the "shrinking circle stage," housewives find replacements for roles as wife and mother, but these are rarely as satisfying.
Adjustment to changed family patterns can be complicated by factors related to family life.
Some of these factors affect men and women differently:
Women:
Are more family-oriented and find it harder to break this habit.
Experience menopause earlier and more abruptly.
Men:
Find role changes easier as the father's role is less time and effort-consuming.
Can compensate through work satisfaction.
Men and women become disenchanted with marriage for different reasons.
Men are affected by vocational success strains.
Women are affected by feeling useless or if their husband is more concerned about his work.
Disenchantment stems from conditions within the family rather than solely the spousal relationship, intensifying effects of changes.
Adjustment issues are individual and universal, influenced by cultural factors.
Adjustment to Changed Roles
The "empty nest" period brings role changes for parents and a branching out from the family.
This period can be lengthy, prompting changes in roles.
Pattern shifts to a pair-centered relationship from the family-centered stage of early adulthood.Role changes affect women more than men.
Traditionally, the empty nest is viewed as traumatic, though evidence suggests otherwise.
Surveys indicate increased happiness among "empty nest mothers."
Conditions Complicating Adjustments to Changed Family Patterns (Box 12-4)
Physical and psychological disturbances (menopause, climacteric) intensify adjustment issues.
Difficulty breaking the habit of centering life around home and children.
Lack of preparation for family and vocational role changes.
Feelings of failure related to marriage or children's outcomes.
Sense of uselessness when parental tasks diminish.
Disenchantment with marriage due to unforeseen changes.
Resentment towards caring for elderly relatives.
The effect of children's departure is often positive, depending on marital relationships.
Parents recognize their greater love for their children compared to their children’s feelings for them.
Transitions to the empty nest stage are usually transitory with slight impact.
Adjustment to Spouse
Husbands and wives depend on each other for companionship after parental duties end.
Successful adjustments depend on how well adjusted they were before parental roles took precedence.
Establishing a close relationship similar to early marriage is key to happiness.
Difficulties increase with few outside interests, overprotective parents, and building lives around children.
Establishing relationships takes time, as marital satisfaction decreases when children leave home, but then increases.
Sexual Adjustments
Evidence shows sex is important to marital satisfaction in middle age, with a sharp rise in satisfaction after the parental years.
Sexual satisfaction increases during the launching stage.
Satisfaction is greater with completed intercourse for both men and women.
Women can enjoy coitus without orgasm more than in early marriage, while men need to complete the sexual act to be satisfied.
Poor sexual adjustment interferes with marital adjustment, leading to disenchantment.
Causes of Poor Sexual Adjustment
Differences in sex drive timing.
Men becoming concerned with loss of sexual vigor.
Women losing inhibitions.
Women deciding to have a child.
Women stopping intercourse
Effects of Good Sexual Adjustment
Satisfactory adjustments result in increased satisfaction after early adulthood.
A woman's sexual satisfaction is influenced by her husband’s behavior, while a man's lessening satisfaction is due to internal conditions.
Adjustments to In-Laws
Adjustments to children's spouses and care of aging parents are needed.
Difficulties
Short courtships, spouses from other communities, not being consulted.
Expecting the same relationship, necessity for married children to live with in-laws, offering advice, sociocultural dissimilarity, elopement.
Disapproval of cohabitation, marriage, forced pregnancy, or disapproval of son-in-law’s occupation.
Caring for Aging Parents
More uncommon today due to surviving on social security.
Less complicated today than in the past because of nuclear families.
Middle-aged persons often lack opportunities and feel deprived.
Problems of Single Women
Employment and vocational advancement are tougher for women than for men.
Less chance of finding new jobs if they lose one.
Often denied opportunities from prestigous careers
Working doesn't always mean security that comes from marriage.
Most single women assume responsibility of caring for elderly parents.
Must limit social life which makes them lonely.
Problems of Single Women
Because he has not had the responsibilities of a family through the early adult years, he has been able to devote as much time as he wished to his work, and he has been free to move to areas where greater opportunities were available.
The middle-aged bachelor is therefore generally at the peak of his career, and he has little reason to be concerned about unemployment.
Furthermore, a single man is not handicapped by the problems of caring for elderly parents unless no other family members can assume the responsibility.
Adjustment to Loss of a Spouse
Presents many adjustment problems for men and women.
For women, extreme feelings of loneliness intensifies
Normal sexual desires is frustrated and economic problems are inevitable.Different effects of loss of a spouse according to the cause of loss: death or divorce
Loss by Divorce
If wife divoreds husband social problems are even harder to cope with, Not only is dvorced woman excluded from activities, but loses old friends.
Los by Death
Except men and women go through a predictable grief course if it followed a long terminal illness.
Stages
Numbness:
individual unable to grasp idea of death
pining:
Charazterized by the recollection of the past an strong wish that they could continue.
Depression:
Resulting from acceptance of death, resorts to solitude and escape.
Recovery:
Individual acceptance of death and reattempts to make new life.
Because of this divorce or threat of divorce is one of the most serious marital hazards of middle age.
In constrast to younger, middle aged people divorce of spouse, unfaithful, and irresponsibilty
Remarriage
is likely to be hazardous, financial problems interefere as well
Most avoid due to difficult adjustment problems
Assessment of Adjustmen to Middle Age
Should be a time of payoff from new responsibilities
And redefining oneself as a person.
Vocational Hazards
The most important attitudes on the part of husband and wife that militate against the establishment of good relationships are
Dissatisfaction with sexual adjustments
Dissatisfaction with sexual adjustments
Loss of a spouse, remarriage, divorce.