FAMILY
AND WORK
BALANCE
I was more intrigued with the title "Where are the Children?" in an article, my answer would be "Am I the total sum of my womb". I didn't know that the intelligence of mankind had traveled south of the body.
As a management perspective, a vast majority of parents would be sacked for mis-management and wouldn't even get a look in for compensation. Period. And children in terms of a commodity would have crashed the stock market many times over by now, due to wasting resources and missed investment opportunities.
For if I wouldn't let a child loose with matches, I wouldn't even let most parents loose on children either. If society doesn't know the management skills yet, surely it doesn't have a clue on the art of parenthood. However, some parents do like perfecting the art of childbearing with great gusto. This is reflected in society around the world.
Even if we take some of the material churned out over the centuries by so called experts be it from a religious or political rhetoric, most have found their way into the heaven of space called the dustbin. Religion and politics don't raise children, never has never will.
Perhaps computers would do it better, cause they can't be classified by gender on parenthood.
For any man's point of view sometimes it better to read how they feel about themselves to understand equality and their career and lives. From an extract given in the book regarding "Gender Crossover: Comfort or Crisis?" (page 149-150) is that:
"...Partners at the same developmental stage are often out of sync. When healthy, educated women reach their fifties today, they generally feel a great release of energy - post-menopausal zest. They are likely to say "Hey, I have thirty or forty years ahead of me, Let's Go!!". Men facing the same passage, if they view it as a loss of power or potency, become threatened that they are less needed by women. This imbalance has created one of the newer and most challenging passages for men and women in middle-life today: gender crossover.
Hard evidence of this comes from US Bureau of Labor Statistics: two thirds of men aged 55-64 do some paid work. But their participation in the labor force has not increased at all in the last ten years. However women of the same range of age has increased....."
The book also discusses the Guy Thing and What Keeps a Man Young. Ironically its written by a woman so there is equal opportunity as it demonstrates years ago no guy would be interviewed by a woman regarding "The Male Sexual Life Cycle" and "Men Behaving Intelligently" in the same breath.
In management to go into any endeavour is with forethought not emotions. If there isn't awareness of lifestyle factors it could lead you to over stretched resources and a build up of resentment. Some businesses having failed to anticipate the needs within the organisation as well as its future or down-turns in the market, so it doesn't surprise me that there is a conflict where work and family balance with more insistence for parental leave and family policies.
The balance is between commitment of its staff and needs of the whole organisation.
REFERENCE SOURCES:
Passage In Men's Lives written
by Gail Sheehy
published by: Simon and Schuster.
New Passages For Men written by
Gail Sheehy
published by: HarperCollins.
WEBLINK ARTICLES:
WEBSITE SOURCES:
flametree.co.uk
worklifeforum.com
employers for work-life
balance.org.uk
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