Generativity: The Work of Adulthood PDF

Generativity: Generativity: The Work of Adulthood Adults satisfy their need to be generative in many ways, especially through parenthood, caregiving, and employment. Parenthood Erikson thought that generativity often became manifest in “establishing and guiding the next generation” (Erikson, 1993a,...

Generativity: Generativity: The Work of Adulthood Adults satisfy their need to be generative in many ways, especially through parenthood, caregiving, and employment. Parenthood Erikson thought that generativity often became manifest in “establishing and guiding the next generation” (Erikson, 1993a, p. 267). Traditionally, that meant raising one’s own biological offspring. Now millions of adults are raising stepchildren, foster children, or adopted (formally or not) children. Parenthood is never easy, but it is particularly difficult if an adult still struggles with intimacy or identity needs. Marital happiness dips in the first year or two after a birth, because intimacy diminishes. Worse yet is having a baby as part of the search for identity — to prove manhood or womanhood to oneself. It may be harder than ever to be a good parent. Currently, the culture emphasizes “intensive parenting,” which puts the responsibility for a child’s health and happiness on the parents, “with joyful, meaningful, and rewarding experiences interwoven with frustrating, challenges and exhausting workloads of care” (Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2020, p. 201). One outcome is that parenthood now bumps against gender norms. Many emerging adults believe in gender equality — that men and women are equally suited for employment, housework, and child care. But with birth, breast-feeding, and infant care, they tilt toward believing that women and men differ in their roles and abilities (Endendijk et al., 2018). That may mean joyous acceptance, or ongoing resentment — for her if she feels stuck with more baby care and housework than she expected, and for him if he feels excluded from the mother–infant bond. Not always, of course, but these emotions arise from the day-to-day needs of an infant, not from cultural sexism. More Dad … and Mom Worldwide, fathers are spending more time playing with their children — daughters as well as sons, as these two photos show. Does that mean that mothers spend less time with their children? No — the data show that mothers are spending more time as well. We know this because the data came from a large study in the Netherlands, where gender equity is a national value. Nonetheless, when Dutch adults become parents, they tend to follow traditional gender roles (Khoudja & Fleischmann, 2018). This gender division is found despite another fact: Fathers are more involved with child care than they were a few generations ago, and mothers are far more likely to be employed. This does not mean that mothers do less child care. Indeed, the data suggest that mothers are more intensely involved with each child than they were a few generations ago. The reason for that shift is partly an ideological one. If intensive parenting is required, then both parents need to be more involved with their children than their own parents were. This is possible, despite employment of both parents, because families have fewer children and because appliances, take-out food, and paper diapers mean less housework. When it comes to child care, however, the gender division of family labor remains (Frejka et al., 2018). Usually, mothers feed infants, schedule pediatric visits, plan birthday parties, arrange play dates, choose schools and after-school activities, and have deeper conversations with teenagers. Chapter App 13 Cozi Family Organizer iOS: https://tinyurl.com/y5cynkkk ANDROID: https://tinyurl.com/y4b4byu8 RELEVANT TOPIC: Sharing family labor The Cozi Family Organizer app helps users manage everyday family life with a shared calendar, reminders, to-do lists, and grocery list. This free, easy-to-use app can be used on most mobile devices and computers; a premium ad-free version with additional features is available for a yearly fee. What has changed is rigid mother/father boundaries, prompting many to describe a “revolution” in women’s roles, with each couple deciding what is best for their family. For example, in 2012, fathers provided primary child care and mothers were the chief wage earners in 8 percent of all U.S. families, almost triple the rate in 2004 (Young & Schieman, 2018). Employed women not only earn more money, but also have m raising children, but specifics depend on the age of the children and the gender of the parent. Mothers are more likely to scale back during infancy; fathers choose more flexible schedules when the children are in elementary school (Young & Schieman, 2018). The COVID pandemic added stress to everyone, but especially to parents. One in four parents lost work, many became depressed or anxious, and virtually all experienced disruptions of schedules and routines (Tang et al., 2021). Nonparents may imagine that the schoolchild’s worst problem when the pandemic closed schools was lost instruction, but parents saw emotional stress and social isolation. One said, “bickering has become an everyday ordeal”; another that her child was “afraid to leave the house”; a third that the child “cries a lot” (Lee et al., 2021). Parenting a troubled child, 24/7, with no relief from teachers, friends, and grandparents doubled or tripled the rate of parental stress. Even without COVID-19, during the child-rearing years, privacy and income rarely seem adequate, and difficulties arise, with shyness or aggression, with talking too much or too little, with reading or math, with being clumsy at sports or having illegible handwriting, and so on. It is the nature of childhood that challenges come and go, so a second-grader with a problem might, with a different teacher or better friends, have a happy fourth-grade year. It is the nature of generativity that parents care intensely about the well-being of their children. Generativity, then, involves anxiety. NONBIOLOGICAL PARENTS The problems just cited arise no matter what the origin of parenthood, but nonbiological parenting adds more challenges. Adoptive parents may experience the best form of alternate parenthood, since their children are theirs for life. Moreover, adoptive children are much wanted, so the parents have chosen to provide the intensive care that children need. Current adoptions are usually “open,” which means that the birth parents decided that someone else would be a better parent, but they still want some connection to their child. The child knows about this arrangement, which makes it easier for everyone than the former “closed” adoption, when children and birth parents felt abandoned (Grotevant, 2020). Joy from Generativity Six smiling members of this family from New Port Richey, Florida, are typical in one way and not in another. Unusual is that all four sisters are adopted. Typical is that the parents get great joy from their daughters, as is evident from their wide smiles. Strong parent–child attachments often develop, especially when children are adopted as infants. DSM-5 recognizes reactive attachment disorder, when children fail to form secure attachments. That can occur with any child, but the risk increases if a child experienced institutionalization or a series of placements before adoption (Vasquez & Stensland, 2016). As you remember, adolescence — the time when teenagers seek their own identity — can stress any family. This stage is particularly problematic for adoptive families because normal conflicts in family relationships have an added stress (Neil & Beek, 2020). One college student who felt well loved and cared for by her adoptive parents explains: In attempts to upset my parents sometimes I would (foolishly) say that I wish I was given to another family, but I never really meant it. Still when I did meet my birth family, I could definitely tell we were related I fit in with them so well. I guess I have a very similar attitude and make the same faces as my birth mother! It really makes me consider nature to be very strong in personality. [A., personal communication] Tensions increase if outsiders hold the mistaken notion that only biological parents are the “real” parents. Of course, no matter what the genetic or ethnic connection between parents and children, the real parents are those who provide generative care. Helping children develop pride in their own history is a challenge for every parent, adoptive or not. Many adoptive parents who adopt either internationally or interethnically seek multiethnic family friends and teach their children about their heritage. On the other hand, there is no doubt that an adult’s ability to adopt is affected by their income, nationality, and ethnicity, and that may be unfair to other adults (Marr et al., 2020). THINK CRITICALLY: Can parents of one ethnic group teach adopted children of another ethnicity what they need to know? STEPPARENTS Generativity is also required for stepparents, who, unlike adoptive parents, did not seek parenthood. Moreover, the average new stepchild is 9 years old, already with habits, morals, and personality traits developed before the stepparent arrived. New living arrangements are always disruptive for children (Goodnight et al., 2013). The effects are cumulative; emotions erupt in adolescence if not before, especially if the child is coping with a new school, loss of friends, or puberty. Stepchildren may intensify their attachment to their birth parents, which may upset the stepparent. Added to that, stepchildren make parenting harder. They have higher rates than other children of illness, injury, or, if they are teenagers, pregnancy, addiction, and arrest. Those childish reactions to disruption are understandable; so is the resentment that stepparents feel. Mothers usually remain attached to their biological children after separation, but fathers, biological or step, are closely connected only if the man earned that relationship when the children were young (van Houdt et al., 2020). This makes generatively more difficult for adult men. Few adults — biological parents or not — can live up to the generative ideal, day after day. Some stepparents quit trying. Understandable but wrong for both child and parent. Hopefully, the new couple feels happy with each other, and the stepparent is sufficiently mature to react to hostility with patience. But, as one stepmother said: The dynamic is too crazy and you’re trying as a, you know, as a stepmom I felt like I didn’t want to overstep my bounds but yet I didn’t want to seem like was aloof either. So it’s really hard. It was really hard for me to find my place with the boys. [quoted in Perry-Fraser & Fraser, 2018, p. 245] FOSTER PARENTS Almost half a million U.S. children were officially in foster care in the United States in 2020, about half of them cared for by adults who were strangers to them, with most of the rest officially under the care of grandparents or other relatives. Many others are unofficially in foster care, because someone other than their biological parent has taken them in. Here’s Your Baby But only for a few weeks. More than 70 babies have spent days or weeks with Becky O’Connell until being united with their adoptive parents. As with baby Alex, shown here, the hardest part is giving them up — but, at age 64, Becky is unlikely to become a mother herself. This is the most difficult form of generativity of all, partly because foster children typically have emotional and behavioral needs that require intense involvement and emotional maturity. The social context makes it worse, as their efforts and commitment are devalued by society and the children themselves. NONBIOLOGICAL PARENTS The problems just cited arise no matter what the origin of parenthood, but nonbiological parenting adds more challenges. Adoptive parents may experience the best form of alternate parenthood, since their children are theirs for life. Moreover, adoptive children are much wanted, so the parents have chosen to provide the intensive care that children need. Current adoptions are usually “open,” which means that the birth parents decided that someone else would be a better parent, but they still want some connection to their child. The child knows about this arrangement, which makes it easier for everyone than the former “closed” adoption, when children and birth parents felt abandoned (Grotevant, 2020). Joy from Generativity Six smiling members of this family from New Port Richey, Florida, are typical in one way and not in another. Unusual is that all four sisters are adopted. Typical is that the parents get great joy from their daughters, as is evident from their wide smiles. Strong parent–child attachments often develop, especially when children are adopted as infants. DSM-5 recognizes reactive attachment disorder, when children fail to form secure attachments. That can occur with any child, but the risk increases if a child experienced institutionalization or a series of placements before adoption (Vasquez & Stensland, 2016). As you remember, adolescence — the time when teenagers seek their own identity — can stress any family. This stage is particularly problematic for adoptive families because normal conflicts in family relationships have an added stress (Neil & Beek, 2020). One college student who felt well loved and cared for by her adoptive parents explains: In attempts to upset my parents sometimes I would (foolishly) say that I wish I was given to another family, but I never really meant it. Still when I did meet my birth family, I could definitely tell we were related I fit in with them so well. I guess I have a very similar attitude and make the same faces as my birth mother! It really makes me consider nature to be very strong in personality. [A., personal communication] Tensions increase if outsiders hold the mistaken notion that only biological parents are the “real” parents. Of course, no matter what the genetic or ethnic connection between parents and children, the real parents are those who provide generative care. Helping children develop pride in their own history is a challenge for every parent, adoptive or not. Many adoptive parents who adopt either internationally or interethnically seek multiethnic family friends and teach their children about their heritage. On the other hand, there is no doubt that an adult’s ability to adopt is affected by their income, nationality, and ethnicity, and that may be unfair to other adults (Marr et al., 2020). THINK CRITICALLY: Can parents of one ethnic group teach adopted children of another ethnicity what they need to know? STEPPARENTS Generativity is also required for stepparents, who, unlike adoptive parents, did not seek parenthood. Moreover, the average new stepchild is 9 years old, already with habits, morals, and personality traits developed before the stepparent arrived. New living arrangements are always disruptive for children (Goodnight et al., 2013). The effects are cumulative; emotions erupt in adolescence if not before, especially if the child is coping with a new school, loss of friends, or puberty. Stepchildren may intensify their attachment to their birth parents, which may upset the stepparent. Added to that, stepchildren make parenting harder. They have higher rates than other children of illness, injury, or, if they are teenagers, pregnancy, addiction, and arrest. Those childish reactions to disruption are understandable; so is the resentment that stepparents feel. Mothers usually remain attached to their biological children after separation, but fathers, biological or step, are closely connected only if the man earned that relationship when the children were young (van Houdt et al., 2020). This makes generatively more difficult for adult men. Few adults — biological parents or not — can live up to the generative ideal, day after day. Some stepparents quit trying. Understandable but wrong for both child and parent. Hopefully, the new couple feels happy with each other, and the stepparent is sufficiently mature to react to hostility with patience. But, as one stepmother said: The dynamic is too crazy and you’re trying as a, you know, as a stepmom I felt like I didn’t want to overstep my bounds but yet I didn’t want to seem like was aloof either. So it’s really hard. It was really hard for me to find my place with the boys. [quoted in Perry-Fraser & Fraser, 2018, p. 245] FOSTER PARENTS Almost half a million U.S. children were officially in foster care in the United States in 2020, about half of them cared for by adults who were strangers to them, with most of the rest officially under the care of grandparents or other relatives. Many others are unofficially in foster care, because someone other than their biological parent has taken them in. STEPPARENTS Generativity is also required for stepparents, who, unlike adoptive parents, did not seek parenthood. Moreover, the average new stepchild is 9 years old, already with habits, morals, and personality traits developed before the stepparent arrived. New living arrangements are always disruptive for children (Goodnight et al., 2013). The effects are cumulative; emotions erupt in adolescence if not before, especially if the child is coping with a new school, loss of friends, or puberty. Stepchildren may intensify their attachment to their birth parents, which may upset the stepparent. Added to that, stepchildren make parenting harder. They have higher rates than other children of illness, injury, or, if they are teenagers, pregnancy, addiction, and arrest. Those childish reactions to disruption are understandable; so is the resentment that stepparents feel. Mothers usually remain attached to their biological children after separation, but fathers, biological or step, are closely connected only if the man earned that relationship when the children were young (van Houdt et al., 2020). This makes generatively more difficult for adult men. Few adults — biological parents or not — can live up to the generative ideal, day after day. Some stepparents quit trying. Understandable but wrong for both child and parent. Hopefully, the new couple feels happy with each other, and the stepparent is sufficiently mature to react to hostility with patience. But, as one stepmother said: The dynamic is too crazy and you’re trying as a, you know, as a stepmom I felt like I didn’t want to overstep my bounds but yet I didn’t want to seem like was aloof either. So it’s really hard. It was really hard for me to find my place with the boys. [quoted in Perry-Fraser & Fraser, 2018, p. 245] FOSTER PARENTS Almost half a million U.S. children were officially in foster care in the United States in 2020, about half of them cared for by adults who were strangers to them, with most of the rest officially under the care of grandparents or other relatives. Many others are unofficially in foster care, because someone other than their biological parent has taken them in. Here’s Your Baby But only for a few weeks. More than 70 babies have spent days or weeks with Becky O’Connell until being united with their adoptive parents. As with baby Alex, shown here, the hardest part is giving them up — but, at age 64, Becky is unlikely to become a mother herself. This is the most difficult form of generativity of all, partly because foster children typically have emotional and behavioral needs that require intense involvement and emotional maturity. The social context makes it worse, as their efforts and commitment are devalued by society and the children themselves. Contrary to popular prejudice, adults become foster parents more often for psychosocial than financial reasons, part of the adult generativity impulse (Geiger et al., 2013). Official foster parents are paid, but they typically earn far less than a babysitter would, or than they themselves would in a conventional job. Most children are in foster care for less than a year, as the goal is usually a reunion with the birth parent. Children may be moved back to the original family for reasons unrelated to the wishes, competence, or emotions of the foster parents or the children. The average child entering the foster-care system is 6 years old (Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018). Many spent their early years with their birth families and are attached to them. Such human bonding is normally beneficial, not only for the children but also for the adults. However, if birth parents are so neglectful or abusive that their children are removed, the child’s past insecure or disorganized attachment impedes acceptance of the foster parent. Most foster children have experienced long-standing maltreatment and have witnessed violence; they are understandably suspicious of any adult. Given the realities of life for those half a million U.S. children in official foster care, and the millions more in other nations, it is sad but unsurprising that a review of longitudinal research concludes that many foster children develop serious problems, including less education, more arrests, and earlier death (Gypen et al., 2017). Generative adults needed! Your knowledge of human development leads to recognition of another problem: Policies make it difficult for foster parents to be generative, because children are removed from their care for reasons that do not reflect the quality of attachment. There is occasional good news: When a child has been with a stable foster family for years, about half the time a healthy, mutual attachment develops (Joseph et al., 2014). GRANDPARENTS As already mentioned, the empty-nest stage of a marriage, when children have finally grown up and started independent lives, is often a happy time for parents. Grown children are more often a source of pride than of stress. Everybody Contributes A large four-generation family such as this one helps meet the human need for love and belonging, the middle level of Maslow’s hierarchy. When social scientists trace who contributes what to whom, the results show that everyone does their part, but the flow is more down than up: Grandparents give more money and advice to younger generations than vice versa. A new opportunity for generativity, as well as a new source of stress, occurs if grandchildren appear. Adults traditionally became grandparents at about age 40, but now, in developed nations, grandparenthood begins on average at about age 50. That shifts the grandparent role to later in adulthood, but advances in longevity means that most adults still have decades of active grandparenting (Margolis & Arpino, 2019). Thus, most adults begin grandparenthood 15 years before the next stage of development, late adulthood, which begins at age 65. Most continue to be grandparents and sometimes great-grandparents for several decades, while they also look after members of the older generation, as discussed in detail in Chapter 15. Grandparent generativity often has become a new challenge. Specifics depend on policies, customs, gender, past parenting, and income of both adult generations, but for every adult the generative impulse extends to caring for the youngest generation (Price et al., 2018). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that involved grandparents share a residence with their grandchildren. Only about 5 percent of all grandparents do so, and usually the child’s mother lives there, too, doing most of the child care. Co-residence may signify poverty, not generativity, and may become problematic for all three generations (Masfety et al., 2019). Regarding co-residence, one study surprised the researchers. They compared young African American mothers who lived with their mothers and those who did not. The scientists were not surprised that the grandparent generation did not fare as well as grandparents who lived nearby but not with their children. That had already been discovered and replicated. But given “the enthusiasm of policy-makers for three-generation households,” the study authors expected that the younger generations would benefit. Not so. The young women who had their own homes were less often depressed than those who lived with their mothers (Black et al., 2002). Their children also fared better, cognitively and emotionally, when they lived with their mothers but not their grandmothers. The researchers suggested possible reasons. Perhaps conflicts arose when the mother and grandmother disagreed about child care, or perhaps the grandmothers disrupted mother–child attachment (Black et al., 2002). Income may be a factor: If the family could afford separate homes, then the children may have had advantages that those living with grandmothers did not have. (See A View from Science.) Other research finds that a grandmother who is employed is more likely to retire early if she has major responsibility for her grandchildren (Timonen, 2018). Typically, the grandfather is also supportive, but marital conflict sometimes erupts because the grandmother seems more concerned about younger generations than about her husband. One grandmother, who said she needed to keep working so she would have a salary, reported: When my daughter divorced, they nearly lost the house to foreclosure, so I went on the loan and signed for them. But then again, they nearly foreclosed, so my husband and I bought it…. I have to make the payment on my own house and most of the payment on my daughter’s house, and that is hard…. I am hoping to get that money back from our daughter, to quell my husband’s sense that the kids are all just taking, and no one is ever giving back. He sometimes feels used and abused. [quoted in Meyer, 2014, pp. 5–6] We should not focus only on the intergenerational problems. In every nation, adults who are grandparents usually enjoy helping their children and connecting with grandchildren. Some grandmothers are rhapsodic and spiritual about their experience. As one writes: Not until my grandson was born did I realize that babies are actually miniature angels assigned to break through our knee-jerk habits of resistance and to remind us that love is the real reason we’re here. [Golden, 2010, p. 125] A View From Science The Skipped-Generation Family Some U.S. households (about 1 percent) are two-generation families because the middle generation is missing. That is a skipped-generation family, with all parenting work done by the grandparents. Skipped-generation families require every ounce of generativity that grandparents can muster, often at the expense of their own health and happiness. This family type sometimes is designated officially to provide kinship care (true for one-third of the foster children), and it may include formal adoption by the grandparents. In general, skipped-generation families have several strikes against them. Both the grandparents and the grandchildren are sad about the missing middle generation. In addition, difficult grandchildren (such as drug-affected infants and rebellious school-age boys) are more likely to live with grandparents (Hayslip & Smith, 2013). Many grandparents are resilient, but the challenges are real. But before concluding that grandparents suffer when they are responsible for grandchildren, consider China, where millions of grandparents outside the urban areas become full-time caregivers because members of the middle generation have jobs in the cities and are unable to take children with them. In this way, Chinese culture and policy harms families, but, surprisingly, it does not seem to harm the elders. The Chinese parents who are employed far from their natal home typically send money and visit once a year, on a national holiday. Studies are contradictory regarding the welfare of the children, but those grandparents seem to have better physical and psychological health (Baker & Silverstein, 2012; Chen, 2011) than grandparents who are not caregivers. Better health does not necessarily mean happiness, however. A recent study of skipped-generation families in China found that grandparents under age 70 who live with their grandchildren without the children’s parents were less happy overall. Those over age 70 were happier — contrary to the expectation of the researchers (Wen et al., 2019). This suggests that the social context is crucial: If grandparents are supported and appreciated by their children and the community, a skipped-generation family may benefit the grandparents. Much depends on attitudes, not simply caregiving itself. Caregiving Child care is the most common form of generativity for adults, but caregiving can and does occur in many other ways as well. Indeed, “life begins with care and ends with care” (Talley & Montgomery, 2013, p. 3). Some caregiving requires meeting physical needs — feeding, cleaning, and so on — but much of it involves fulfilling psychological needs. Caregiving is part of generative adulthood. KINKEEPERS A prime example of caregiving is the kinkeeper, who gathers all the generations for holidays; spreads the word about illness, relocation, or accomplishments; and reminds family members of one another’s birthdays and anniversaries. Kinkeepers also chronicle the family’s history and thereby connect family members, adding to satisfaction and belonging for all family members (Hendry & Ledbetter, 2017). Middle-aged adults allow families and societies “to engage and value the assets found in every generation” (Butts, 2017, p. vi). Mutual caregiving and shared information strengthen family bonds; wise kinkeepers keep those intergenerational channels open; everyone is generative (Hendry & Ledbetter, 2017). Middle-aged adults have been called the sandwich generation, a term that evokes an image of a layer of filling pressed between two slices of bread. This analogy suggests that the middle generation is squeezed because they are expected to support their parents and their growing children. This sandwich metaphor is vivid but misleading (Gonyea, 2013). The researchers suggested possible reasons. Perhaps conflicts arose when the mother and grandmother disagreed about child care, or perhaps the grandmothers disrupted mother–child attachment (Black et al., 2002). Income may be a factor: If the family could afford separate homes, then the children may have had advantages that those living with grandmothers did not have. (See A View from Science.) Other research finds that a grandmother who is employed is more likely to retire early if she has major responsibility for her grandchildren (Timonen, 2018). Typically, the grandfather is also supportive, but marital conflict sometimes erupts because the grandmother seems more concerned about younger generations than about her husband. One grandmother, who said she needed to keep working so she would have a salary, reported: When my daughter divorced, they nearly lost the house to foreclosure, so I went on the loan and signed for them. But then again, they nearly foreclosed, so my husband and I bought it…. I have to make the payment on my own house and most of the payment on my daughter’s house, and that is hard…. I am hoping to get that money back from our daughter, to quell my husband’s sense that the kids are all just taking, and no one is ever giving back. He sometimes feels used and abused. [quoted in Meyer, 2014, pp. 5–6] We should not focus only on the intergenerational problems. In every nation, adults who are grandparents usually enjoy helping their children and connecting with grandchildren. Some grandmothers are rhapsodic and spiritual about their experience. As one writes: Not until my grandson was born did I realize that babies are actually miniature angels assigned to break through our knee-jerk habits of resistance and to remind us that love is the real reason we’re here. [Golden, 2010, p. 125] A View From Science The Skipped-Generation Family Some U.S. households (about 1 percent) are two-generation families because the middle generation is missing. That is a skipped-generation family, with all parenting work done by the grandparents. Skipped-generation families require every ounce of generativity that grandparents can muster, often at the expense of their own health and happiness. This family type sometimes is designated officially to provide kinship care (true for one-third of the foster children), and it may include formal adoption by the grandparents. In general, skipped-generation families have several strikes against them. Both the grandparents and the grandchildren are sad about the missing middle generation. In addition, difficult grandchildren (such as drug-affected infants and rebellious school-age boys) are more likely to live with grandparents (Hayslip & Smith, 2013). Many grandparents are resilient, but the challenges are real. But before concluding that grandparents suffer when they are responsible for grandchildren, consider China, where millions of grandparents outside the urban areas become full-time caregivers because members of the middle generation have jobs in the cities and are unable to take children with them. In this way, Chinese culture and policy harms families, but, surprisingly, it does not seem to harm the elders. The Chinese parents who are employed far from their natal home typically send money and visit once a year, on a national holiday. Studies are contradictory regarding the welfare of the children, but those grandparents seem to have better physical and psychological health (Baker & Silverstein, 2012; Chen, 2011) than grandparents who are not caregivers. Better health does not necessarily mean happiness, however. A recent study of skipped-generation families in China found that grandparents under age 70 who live with their grandchildren without the children’s parents were less happy overall. Those over age 70 were happier — contrary to the expectation of the researchers (Wen et al., 2019). This suggests that the social context is crucial: If grandparents are supported and appreciated by their children and the community, a skipped-generation family may benefit the grandparents. Much depends on attitudes, not simply caregiving itself. Caregiving Child care is the most common form of generativity for adults, but caregiving can and does occur in many other ways as well. Indeed, “life begins with care and ends with care” (Talley & Montgomery, 2013, p. 3). Some caregiving requires meeting physical needs — feeding, cleaning, and so on — but much of it involves fulfilling psychological needs. Caregiving is part of generative adulthood. KINKEEPERS A prime example of caregiving is the kinkeeper, who gathers all the generations for holidays; spreads the word about illness, relocation, or accomplishments; and reminds family members of one another’s birthdays and anniversaries. Kinkeepers also chronicle the family’s history and thereby connect family members, adding to satisfaction and belonging for all family members (Hendry & Ledbetter, 2017). Middle-aged adults allow families and societies “to engage and value the assets found in every generation” (Butts, 2017, p. vi). Mutual caregiving and shared information strengthen family bonds; wise kinkeepers keep those intergenerational channels open; everyone is generative (Hendry & Ledbetter, 2017). Middle-aged adults have been called the sandwich generation, a term that evokes an image of a layer of filling pressed between two slices of bread. This analogy suggests that the middle generation is squeezed because they are expected to support their parents and their growing children. This sandwich metaphor is vivid but misleading (Gonyea, 2013). Longitudinal data found “relatively few cases where middle aged adults were in a ‘sandwich generation’ of simultaneously providing care for aging parents and children younger than 15” (Fingerman et al., 2012d, p. 200). Family members across the generations are especially significant for some adults, but that is more voluntary than obligatory. Moreover, caregiving is mutual, taking many forms. Far from being squeezed, middle-aged adults who provide some financial and emotional help to their adult children are less likely to be depressed than those adults whose children no longer relate to them. The research finds that family members continue to care for each other, less as a matter of obligation but more as a result of valued connections. A Peak Experience For many men, the best part of fatherhood is when their children become old enough to share interest in world events, sports, or, as shown here, climbing a mountain in Norway. Emerging adults, depicted as squeezing their parents, often help their parents understand music, media, fashion, and technology — setting up their smartphones, sending digital photos, fixing computer glitches. They also are more cognizant of nutritional and medical discoveries and guidelines. Caregiving on the other side of the supposed sandwich, from middle-aged adults to their older parents, is typically much less demanding than the metaphor implies. Most members of the over-60 generation are quite independent. Financial support is more likely to flow from the older generation to their middle-aged children than vice versa. If full-time elder care is needed, a spouse, another older person, or a paid nurse is the usual caregiver, not an adult child. Employment Besides parenthood and caregiving, the other major avenue for generativity is employment. Extensive research describes many aspects of employment and economic development. Here we consider only how employment affects human development. GENERATIVITY AND WORK As is evident from many terms and phrases (achievement motivation, instrumental needs, Erikson’s generativity, Maslow’s success and esteem), many developmentalists believe work is central to healthy adulthood. Some work is unpaid, already discussed in the previous pages on parenthood and caregiving. Other work is voluntary, a topic discussed in Chapter 15. Here we focus on work for pay. Employment allows people to: use their personal skills; express their creative energy; aid and advise coworkers, as mentor or friend; support the education and health of their families; contribute to the community by providing goods or services; and develop pride in themselves. Psychologists distinguish the extrinsic rewards of work (benefits such as salary, health insurance, and pension) from the intrinsic rewards of work (personal gratification). Generativity is intrinsic. These two types of rewards may be negatively correlated, if employers or labor unions increase pay instead of increasing worker satisfaction (Kuvaas et al., 2017). That is a mistake, as intrinsic rewards are crucial for productivity and stability. Priorities may change over the years of adulthood. Prospective young workers consider salary and hours. As time goes on, the intrinsic rewards of work, especially relationships with coworkers and the culture of the workplace, become more important (Inceoglu et al., 2012). That may be one reason that older employees are, on average, less often absent or late, and less likely to quit (Rau & Adams, 2014). Seniority makes it more likely that they can satisfy their intrinsic needs, befriending coworkers and mentoring new ones. That gains them status and an outlet for generativity — both intrinsic (Shavit & Carstensen, 2019). Surprisingly, salary (whether a person earns $40,000 or $100,000 or even $1,000,000 a year) matters less for job satisfaction than how pay compares with others in their profession or neighborhood, or with their own salary years earlier. This is not to say that income doesn’t matter. As often stressed in this book, low SES correlates with poor health, inadequate education, destructive living conditions, and premature death. Health insurance is a driving force in the current U.S. economy. But once basic needs are met (which varies by family circumstances, community characteristics, and government policies), income matters less than people assume. Instead, resentment about work arises not directly from wages but from perception of fairness. This is not simple: Base salaries, bonuses, and promotions all affect job satisfaction (Trost, 2020). This explains a puzzle. Most Americans know that corporate heads are paid a hundred times more per year than the lowest employee. However, relatively few consider this a major problem (Brooks & Manza, 2013; Mijs, 2019). Why? Executives themselves want far more money than they need — they compare themselves with other corporate heads. And people at the bottom believe that social mobility is possible — that they themselves will be able to earn more (Davidai & Gilovich, 2015). A related puzzle is that, compared to men, women earn less but are more satisfied with their jobs. This is called the paradox of the contented female worker, first recognized over two decades ago (Clark, 1997; Crosby, 1982). One explanation is that women value nonmonetary rewards, seeking jobs high in generativity, such as nursing and teaching. They become distressed only if men do the same work as they do for more money (Valet, 2018). THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRACT Developmentalists now call attention to the psychological contract, which is the implicit understanding of the relationship between employer and the employee. This is beyond the actual contract, which spells out duties, hours, and so on. Just as every family has rules, rituals, and routines, and every school has a hidden agenda, every workplace has a culture. The psychological contract is part of that. The psychological contract includes procedures to resolve conflict, as well as expectations for the interaction between supervisors and workers (Shen et al., 2019; van Dijke et al., 2018). Some supervisors respect individual differences and needs; others are more rigid regarding, for instance, time, dress, and activity. This contract develops over time. The first-year experiences of a new employee is crucial, and so is the first year after restructuring, merging, or a new supervisor. One of the biggest problems is implicit understanding of what training is forthcoming and who will provide it (Woodrow & Guest, 2020). In general, fair promotions, new learning, and relationships with other workers are crucial for the psychological contract. The contract is between the employer and the employee: Sometimes the employee breeches the contract, sometimes the employer does. In both cases, factors beyond the formal agreements matter, and communication is crucial to prevent resentment, lost efficiency, and employees who quit or are fired (DiFonzo et al., 2020). This reiterates a lesson in many aspects of adult psychosocial development. Communication, such as setting parameters when adult children live with their parents, or improving cooperation between romantic partners, or understanding when grandparents should be involved and when they should stay away, is crucial for psychosocial health. What Is Lost? No, not a package. The driver in an Amazon delivery van keeps careful track of where each order should be delivered. Especially with the COVID pandemic (this photo was taken in England in 2020), as more purchases are made online, the human interaction between customer and clerk is lost. WORK SCHEDULES Current business practices are often set with profit as the only goal, without regard for the family lives of the employees. We could discuss many of these: factory closings, pension set asides, health benefits, automatization. An objective discussion would highlight costs and benefits, evident in every policy. However here we focus on only one practice, schedule variations, which may affect families in ways that few employers realize. The standard workweek is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday — a schedule that is increasingly unusual. In the United States, about half of all employees have nonstandard schedules. Retail services (online and in-store) are increasingly available 24/7, which requires night and weekend work. Many other parts of the economy (hospitals, police, hotels, restaurants, transportation) need employees before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m. In addition, many employees work part time, or seasonally, or hourly, or independently, unlike the 40-hour, 9 to 5, schedule. Even worse for family life may be unpredictability, when schedules change from day to day. In a study of workers with young children in one California town (Emeryville, near San Francisco), 87 percent experienced an unpredicted schedule change. Sometimes they were told the day before that they were not needed on a particular day; sometimes they were asked to work when they thought they would be home; sometimes they were told not to work when they had already expected to earn money on a particular day (Ananat & Gassman-Pines, 2021). Varied schedules of any sort upset the body rhythms of adults, making them more vulnerable to physical illness as well as to emotional problems. Hundreds of studies confirm that (Cho, 2018; Schneider & Harknett, 2019). All mammals depend on circadian rhythm. When a person has a nonstandard schedule, or when each family member has nonoverlapping schedules, that undercuts family function and adult social interactions. Specific data find that, perhaps because of disrupted sleep, shift workers have higher rates of obesity, illness, and death. One detail: Women more often develop breast cancer if their work hours vary (Wegrzyn et al., 2017). Night work itself increases the risk of breast cancer (Cordina-Duverger et al., 2018). Rotating schedules are worse than steady night work, with restful sleep particularly elusive (Kecklund & Axelsson, 2016). Beyond health, the impact of varying schedules on family life is a major concern for developmentalists (Cho, 2018). Those who are most likely to have mandatory nonstandard schedules are parents of young children, exactly the people who need regular schedules. THINK CRITICALLY: Is the connection between employment and developmental health cause or correlation? The focus is often on working mothers, but weekend work, especially with mandatory overtime, is also difficult for father–child relationships, because “normal rhythms of family life are impinged upon by irregular schedules” (Hook, 2012, p. 631). Couples who have less time together are more likely to divorce. In theory, one solution might be part-time work or self-employment. But reality does not conform to the theory. In many nations, part-time work is underpaid and without benefits. Thus, workers avoid part-time employment if they can, again making a choice that inadvertently undercuts their emotional well-being and family life. Self-employment often means more work for less money (Lange, 2012; Millán et al., 2013). Remember the paradox of the contented female worker? This holds true for self-employment as well. Women who are their own boss tend to work harder for less money, but be relatively happy doing so (Bender & Roche, 2016). Is that because flexibility of such work is particularly important to women, who more often are family caregivers? Another scheduling issue that may harm families is the rise of temporary employees, with some companies (including colleges) having more temporary employees than permanent ones. This makes sense for the employers: It provides a buffer against another recession, and it is cheaper to hire workers without full benefits. However, it does not help workers. Job uncertainty, which underlies many schedule uncertainties, increases job dissatisfaction, which increases family stress (Dawson et al., 2017). Temporary workers themselves have uncertain employment futures, of course, but their presence may affect the permanent workers as well (Akkerman et al., 2020). For this, as well as for other aspects of the work culture, much depends on the hidden elements of the psychological contract. employees, with some companies (including colleges) having more temporary employees than permanent ones. This makes sense for the employers: It provides a buffer against another recession, and it is cheaper to hire workers without full benefits. However, it does not help workers. Job uncertainty, which underlies many schedule uncertainties, increases job dissatisfaction, which increases family stress (Dawson et al., 2017). Temporary workers themselves have uncertain employment futures, of course, but their presence may affect the permanent workers as well (Akkerman et al., 2020). For this, as well as for other aspects of the work culture, much depends on the hidden elements of the psychological contract. In this, as in many aspects of scheduling, the needs of employers and employees conflict. Are work teams that include permanent and temporary workers less effective than those that are less blended? The answer, not surprisingly, it that it depends. What about work groups that include gender, ethnic, and religious diversity? In some teams, a clear understanding of roles and goals makes differences welcomed, because each person’s contribution benefits the group (Clinton et al., 2020). This raises a larger issue that has captured the attention of many psychologists: the balance between employee diversity and productivity, especially when teams of people work together. See Opposing Perspectives. Opposing Perspectives Teamwork One dilemma for employers is how to organize employees into groups, or departments, or teams. Should teams be composed of people who are similar in age, gender, ethnicity, background, and personality? Or is diversity best? A well-functioning team is a matter of life and death in hospitals, or in the military, or in space exploration. To pick an extreme example, NASA is preparing for a mission to Mars that will send four to six people in a small space for three years, with times of intense work followed by no work at all. The team will confront unknown dangers, and sometimes communication from Earth will be impossible (Driskell et al., 2018). Should they seek gender, ethnic, and age diversity? Or would the team function better if they were all White adult men in their 30s? This question is not hypothetical. The Institute of Medicine (2000) published a report titled To Err Is Human that attributed 44,000 U.S. deaths each year to medical errors, many of which could have been avoided if all the medical professionals worked together well. Similarly, studies of airplane crashes often find misunderstandings and misinterpretations among people who needed to work together. Is diversity an aid or an impediment for a team? Sometimes “racioethnic diversity was related to increased conflict, and decreased trust” (Bell et al., 2018, p. 352). Nonetheless, “the real value of teamwork and collaboration lies in the ability to draw from diverse perspectives and expertise to solve complex problems” (Thayer et al., 2018, p. 363). Trust is crucial for the three essential parts of a good team: cooperation, coordination, and communication (Salas et al., 2018). Microaggressions may be not be recognized by one person but may be disturbing to another: That reduces cooperation. Effective teams include mutual help, but cultural differences in eye contact, humor, body position, and so on lead to mistrust. For instance, is averted eye contact evidence of dishonesty or respect? Your answer depends on your culture. Should trust be enhanced by comprising teams of like-minded people, who readily understand each other? That is easiest, but not best. Ideally, each person brings a unique contribution to the group; interdependent team members may complement each other, making the team greater than the sum of the individuals. To pick an easy example, doctors want nurses to give prescribed medicine at the proper dose and time. Diversity makes this harder: Picture a young, Black female nurse questioning an older, White, male doctor, and you can see the problem. Yet nurses need to raise questions, which is more likely when the nurse’s perspective is unlike the doctor’s. Similar dilemmas can arise with every team. It is crucial that both the nurse and the doctor trust the other: sometimes one is right, sometimes the other is. The overall conclusion is that diversity may benefit the final product but that simply putting diverse people together does not insure those benefits. How can a work team function well? Psychologists have three suggestions. Help team members get past superficial differences (ethnicity, gender, age) to recognize their common humanity. Team-building might begin with talk about family, pets, or details of daily life, or with stress-free interactions in games, jokes, exercises. Choose team members whose personality traits encourage team functioning. Three of the Big Five (conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness) are needed, yet a team in which everyone is high in these traits is handicapped. Agreeableness, for instance, helps everyone get along, but groups need some disagreement to function best. Have a clear and measurable goal, explained well. When the team sees the team’s progress, differences fade. To help you understand this, consider your college education. Have you learned when teachers or classmates express ideas from a perspective that is unlike yours? THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COST OF UNEMPLOYMENT For adults of any age, unemployment — especially if it lasts more than a few weeks — is destructive of mental and physical health. Generative needs are unmet, which increases the rate of domestic abuse, substance use disorder, depression, and many other social and mental health problems (Compton et al., 2014; Wanberg, 2012). Uncertainty about future income and work adds to family stress (Schneider et al., 2017). A meta-analysis of research on eight stressful events found that losing a job was even worse for mental health than the death of a parent. The stress of unemployment lingered after finding a job (Luhmann et al., 2012). Unemployment is worse for physical health as well, increasing the rate of serious illness, drug addiction, and deaths of despair (Case & Deaton, 2020). The harm from unemployment depends partly on how old a person is. With the past recession and with COVID-19, jobs were most scarce for emerging adults, especially if they were NEET (not in education, employment, or training). Because attitudes about work are established in early adulthood, lack of a job in early adulthood may harm a cohort lifelong, a “grave concern” (Goldman-Mellor et al., 2016, p. 202). If young college graduates cannot find a job that matches their education and ambition, they may become depressed, drug addicted (especially to marijuana), and despairing. The gap between hope and reality hits hard. In the twenty-first century, many young adults have found work in the gig economy, which includes all of the temporary, episodic, or independent jobs that do not have an hourly wage or health benefits (see Figure 13.3). They drive cars for hire, tutor children, sell items online, act as social media “influencers,” and much more. All of these jobs depend on other people having disposable income, so opportunities disappeared with the COVID pandemic. FIGURE 13.3 It Might Be Worse Only half of all U.S. workers have traditional, steady jobs. The other half usually do not have medical or pension benefits, which seems okay at age 25 but disastrous by age 60. How could it be worse? Millions of adults want jobs but are unable to find them. Another group that may be particularly harmed by job loss are slightly older adults, if they have families of their own, with partners and dependent children. Job loss causes a “cascade” of family stresses, with trouble reverberating within the family (McKee-Ryan & Maitoza, 2018). For developmentalists, the effects on children, and on nonworking adults, are among the unseen costs of one employee losing a job. For example, sudden loss of work makes parents more stressed. Child-care arrangements change, so children fight more and comply less, and parents punish more. Everyone worries more and sleeps less, so children fall asleep in school and teachers ask parents to come in, which adds parental stress. Family meals become erratic, with less nutrition and less food, causing hunger, obesity, and health problems in everyone, ignored because medical insurance is gone. Thus, unemployment can turn a happy, supportive family into a sad and destructive one. Relatives and friends are a buffer against the mental health strain of losing a job, but that support is reduced when it is needed most (Crowe & Butterworth, 2016; McKee-Ryan & Maitoza, 2018). All these difficulties may be magnified for immigrants, who, in 2016, were about 15 percent of the U.S. workforce and 22 percent of the workforce in Canada. They are first to be fired, and they are excluded from many public benefits. They often depend on other immigrants for housing, work, religion, and social connections (thus for their intimacy and generativity needs), but many are from cultures where an extensive extended family buffers against poverty. Often their relatives are unable to join them, and thus cannot provide emotional support. The last group to consider are middle-aged adults, age 50 or so. Job loss is destructive of their generativity in ways unlike for younger adults for three reasons: Seniority brings higher salaries, more respect, and greater expertise; losing a job is particularly painful, and similar work is impossible to find, not only because of salary but also because new work may require skills that they never learned. Workers believe that age discrimination is widespread. To the extent that is true, finding new work is harder, with stereotype threat adding to the problem. If a job-seeker believes that their age makes new work less likely, that undercuts successful job searching. In some U.S. states (Hawaii, Nevada, California), unemployment is three times that in others (Nebraska, South Dakota). Specifics rates change year by year, but people have a much better chance of finding a job in some places than others. Thus, relocation may improve job prospects. The older a worker is, the harder it is to move. From a developmental and family perspective, this last factor is crucial. Imagine that you are a 50-year-old who has always lived in Hawaii, and your employer goes out of business. You try to find work, but no one hires you, partly because unemployment in Hawaii in 2019 is highest in the nation. Would you move 2,000 miles to Montana, where the unemployment rate is less than half that of Hawaii? If you had been unemployed for months, were in deep debt, and your family was hungry, you might apply online and find a job in Butte, where, among the national firms you know, online posts in 2021 said that CVS needed a shift supervisor, FedEx needed a driver, GE Aviation needed a human resources staff person. But remember that work is more than a paycheck. Leaving friends, community, familiar climate, and local culture is costly, and your new neighbors might look at you with suspicion. If you got a job in Montana, would your family also leave their homes, jobs, schools, places of worship, relatives, and friends to move with you? If not, you would be deprived of social support. But if they did, their food and housing would be expensive, their schools overcrowded, and their lives lonely. What are the implications of another fact, that the suicide rate in Montana is the highest in the nation? Do not focus too much here on Hawaii and Montana: State-by-state unemployment and suicide rates change year by year. However, remember the general point, that job openings fluctuate, and job seekers have much better success in some places than others. But a happy and healthy life requires much more than a job. Work/Family Balance A major concern for developmentalists is sometimes called work/life balance, the idea that employment demands should be limited to protect the rest of life. Here we refer to work/family balance, since intimacy and generativity needs are met by both work and family. A developmental perspective begins with historical changes. A century ago, work/family balance was achieved by men having jobs and women working at home, so that a husband/father could come home from a hard day at work, convinced that his earnings were his contribution to his family. He could relax while the wife/mother, who took care of the house and children all day, got dinner ready. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the research as well as the adults themselves realized that that this traditional balance of roles restricted both parents. Many stay-at-home mothers were depressed; many fathers felt excluded from their children. These problems came to the surface in the divorce wave of the 1980s in the United States, when many wives wanted their independence and many fathers were distressed that their interactions with their children were several restricted, even though they were required to pay alimony child support. The current movement toward joint custody is welcomed by most researchers who saw the problems with the old model. To help adults be generative, mothers usually have jobs (see Figure 13.4), and fathers spend more time providing child care. FIGURE 13.4 2019, 2020, 2022? The COVID-19 pandemic meant more children at home, and the number of mothers not employed rose three times as fast as the number of fathers. The question is whether there is a rebound in 2022, or if the numbers show long-term effects. Hypothesize, and then find the data. No single pattern is best for every family. Instead, each set of parents determines their own work/family balance. This was evident when employed parents were asked what would they do if their child was sick. The traditional mother/caretaker assumption was far from universal; sometimes they said that the father would stay home, sometimes another relative would be called (Cluley & Hecht, 2020). The same flexibility occurred when the COVID pandemic meant that children had to learn from home. Each family figured out how that should happen. The struggle between obligations of work and parenting were by far the most common problem reported in one study of more than 100 parents (mostly mothers) in Wisconsin (Garbe et al., 2020). Again, mothers were not automatically in charge. Some of the older children themselves were responsible; sometimes fathers, paid caregivers, neighbors, other relatives were called. At first, many families were themselves thrown back to the traditional gender model. After a month of remote learning, one mother explained: The stresses I feel as a wife and mother who works (ordinarily) outside the home…. this is absolute hell for me. I wake up every day and dread what awaits me. I can’t sleep at night, even though I am desperately tired. I don’t know how I’ll get through this. I know I must, but I am beyond exhausted. [quoted in Garbe et al., 2020, p. 56] That mother gathered other resources (family and paid helpers) to restore some balance, acknowledging that she was fortunate that her circumstances allowed that. Other research finds that mothers and fathers with low income found balancing particularly hard. One reason is that, especially among parents who are people of color, the usual helpers — grandparents — were among the most vulnerable to death from COVID-19. Remote Learning Even the most devoted parents cannot provide the individualized instruction and social learning of good schools. Specifics depend on the age of the child: The mother in Italy (left) needs to monitor her teenager, and the father in Serbia (right) needs to guide each step of his 6-year-old. These children are fortunate: Many of the world’s children do not have computers, internet, or parents who can provide personal attention. For parents of every ethnicity, throughout the twenty-first century, new compromises, trade-offs, and selective optimization with compensation may be essential to finding an appropriate work/family balance. Policies (such as maternity and paternity leave when a new baby arrives or a child is sick) may help, but no nation prioritizes balancing employment and family life at every age (Ollo-Lopez & Goñi-Legaz, 2017). Usually the task of finding that balance rests with individuals. DATA CONNECTIONS: Stress in Adulthood: Balancing Family and Career examines how well parents who are employed say they balance their careers with their family responsibilities. Conclusion As evident in these two chapters, adulthood is filled with opportunities and challenges. Adults choose their mates, their locations, and their lifestyles to express their personality. Extroverts surround themselves with many social activities, and introverts choose a quieter but no less rewarding life. Adults have many ways to meet their intimacy needs, with partners of the same or other sex, marriage or cohabiting, friends and family, parents or grown children. Ideally, they find some combination of work/family balance that results in solid social support. Similarly, generativity can focus on raising children, caring for others, or satisfying work, again with more choices and flexibility than in past decades. In some ways, then, modern life allows adults to “have it all,” to combine family and work in such a way that all needs are satisfied at once. However, some very articulate observers suggest that “having it all” is an illusion or, at best, a mistaken ideal achievable only by the very rich and very talented (Slaughter, 2012; Sotomayor, 2014). Compromises, trade-offs, and selective optimization with compensation may be essential to finding an appropriate work/family balance. Both halves of these two sources of generativity can bring joy, but both can bring stress — and often do. In general, adults — mates, family, and friends — help each other, balancing intimacy and generativity needs. Because personality is both enduring and variable, opinions about the impact of modern life reflect personality as well as objective research. Some people are optimists — high in extroversion and agreeableness — and they tend to believe that adulthood is better now than it used to be. Others are pessimists — high in neuroticism and low in openness — and they are likely to conclude that adults were better off before the rise of cohabitation, LAT, divorce, and economic stress. They may laud the time when most people married and stayed married, raising children on the man’s steady salary from his 9-to-5 job with one stable employer.