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A Question of Balance
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11010 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1986 |
2,026 Words |
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Nancy Wolfe
Nancy Wolfe is a Costa Rican-based journalist. |
What would you think about a country where one-quarter of the children are poor, where 50 percent of the children can expect to live part of their lives in a female-headed household, and where an estimated two million to seven million children are left alone after school every day? Unfortunately, this is the case in the United States today.
One of the reasons for this situation, a new study says, is the lack of recognition by the country's employers of changes that have taken place in the American family in the past 20 years. That the average family no longer consists of a working father, a stay-at-home mother, and 2.5 kids is well known, and the fact that more and more mothers are in the work force has also been widely discussed.
A group called the Family Policy Panel (of the United Nations Association of the United States) reports that both men and women are feeling increased conflict between their jobs and their families, and that U.S. employers, unlike those in other countries, have not caught up with the times in their personnel policies. The old image of the family composed of the breadwinner husband and the housekeeper mother now applies to only 10 percent of the population. And yet the panel--composed of prominent business, education, labor, and academic leaders--found that policies regarding maternity leave, fringe benefits, child care, health care, and equal pay are still mostly greed to the old family makeup. Even our schools and most other societal institutions do not take the changes into account.
Panel member Rosalie Wolf of the International Paper Company says: "Employers prefer to assume that solving family problems is
... (1997 of 12240 Characters)
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