Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (14 page)

AARP’s Public Policy Institute has amassed facts about the financial strains besetting many Americans sixty-five and older since the recession as well as longer-term trends, such as the high cost of health care:
30

■
One out of six lives in poverty.

■
Half of the age group has annual individual income below $18,500.

■
Older females are poorer than their male counterparts. (Among blacks, 24 percent of older women are living in poverty compared to 13.7 percent of older men; older white women have a 9.5 percent poverty rate, compared to 5 percent of older men.)

■
Upward of 7 million men and women sixty-five and older are in the labor force, but the unemployment rate for the age group is nearly twice what it was in 2007 and many have been unemployed for a year or longer.

Income losses caused by the recession remain widespread despite signs that recovery is officially under way. US Census data show that median net worth for householders sixty-five and older in 2010 was more than $25,000 less than in 2005: $170,128, down from $195,890.
31
Sentier Research’s comparison of median annual incomes among different racial and ethnic groups found a lower starting point and a larger decrease (11.1 percent) for black Americans than any other group.
32

Once out of a job, older workers tend to remain unemployed longer than younger workers. Rix reports that more than four out of ten older jobseekers were categorized as “long-term unemployed” in January 2013 (defined as being out of work for twenty-seven weeks or more). There is a danger that long-term unemployment could become
structural
: jobless workers lose skills, contacts, and information; they get stigmatized as unemployable; and they become more discouraged and isolated than ever.
33
“
time is not on their side
” blares a front-page headline in the
Boston Globe
.
34
Long-term joblessness—lasting more than one year—is hitting older workers harder than any other age group. “Older” in this article refers to people
forty-five and older
, who constitute nearly half of the 3.5 million Americans unemployed long term. The Department of Labor says the majority are college-educated white men in (what should be) their prime earning years. Not only are their employment prospects dimming, says reporter Megan Woolhouse, their self-esteem is also plummeting. In the words of laid-off men Woolhouse interviewed for the article, “you feel empty,” “you dread the silence” that follows job applications.
35

In response to the “unprecedented” increase in protracted unemployment across all age groups, the BLS issued an unusual announcement with its monthly rundown of the employment situation: the Current Population Survey has for the first time in years allowed survey respondents to report unemployment of
up to five years
in duration instead of up to only two years. It is not surprising that the number of “discouraged” older workers (the official designation for men and women who want a job but have stopped looking) is higher today than at the start of the recession. And, as a result, many hard-pressed Americans who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and their personal savings, if any, are opting for early retirement or in some cases applying to the disability program.

Another group whose numbers are higher than at the start of the recession is made up of older involuntary part-time workers, involuntary because the only work available to them in an uncertain labor market is part time, owing to hours being cut back or an inability to find full-time employment. Typically, along with the shift to part-time status come wage and salary cuts and loss of eligibility for benefits. A sixty-one-year-old man in this situation has been working for forty-five years but is now a substitute teacher who calls in to work daily and gets hired for one to two days of work per week. He has a second job as an outdoor instructor to supplement his modest income from teaching. He also volunteers at a food pantry.

Still another solution to job loss for people who want to keep working is self-employment. However, becoming a successful “silver entrepreneur” in the same field or a different one requires financial resources, connections, drive, and determination that can be hard to come by. For the period since 2007, the proportion of self-employed workers within the older workforce has been about ten percent.
36
Entrepreneurial boomers in the fifty-five to sixty-four age group are starting new businesses at a faster rate than younger workers.
37

Against the dichotomous backdrop of a labor market that is said to be ever bigger, older, and more diverse while remaining unfavorable to the employment and reemployment of older workers, the many and varied success stories of professionals still on the job stand out. Let’s explore further who they are, what they are doing, and why they are opting for work over retirement.

5

Over Sixty and on the Job

Age is nothing. . . . Attitude is everything.—Marie Therese von Rohr-Truong in Luxembourg,
NoAgeSite.com

Previous chapters have introduced individual men still on the job after years of experience in fields as disparate as law, higher education, international development, sports management, film distribution, medicine, social services, and social risk management. While the profiles put a face to the statistics by telling each man’s story in some detail, readers also need basic, summative information about all the 156 professionals who completed my survey and the ways in which they are similar to or different from one another and consistent with or deviating from national trends. To that end, this chapter presents the men’s average age, where they live, marital and family status, educational achievement, earnings, length of time in the workforce, and so on.

Respondents range in age from sixty to ninety-three. Their average age is seventy (the median is seventy-one), making these working men four years older on the whole than the women I studied. Fifty-seven percent of the men are seventy and older; 43 percent are sixty to sixty-nine.

Respondents hail from twenty-two states, the District of Columbia, Belgium, and Canada. New England is home to eighty-four of the men: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont; twenty-five are from the mid-Atlantic region: Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Washington, DC; eleven are from the South: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas; eight are from the Midwest: Illinois, Michigan, Missouri; and twenty-six are from the West, Southwest, and Northwest: Arizona, California, New Mexico, Washington. Heavily represented are Massachusetts residents (50 percent of the total) and Californians (14 percent).

A very high percentage of the men are married (88 percent). Nine are currently divorced (6 percent). There are five widowers, four single men, and one partnered man. We might expect more older men to be married than older women since women in the higher age brackets generally tend to live longer than men and are more likely to be widowed. Indeed, the percentage of older married men exceeds the percentage of older married women by twenty points (68 percent of the women I surveyed are married and the rest are divorced, widowed, or single).

US Census statistics on the marital status of older Americans confirm that older men are much more likely than older women to be married. In 2010, more than three-quarters of American men ages sixty-five to seventy-four (78 percent) were married, compared with over one-half (56 percent) of women in the same age group. The proportion married was lower at older ages: 38 percent of women age seventy-five to eighty-four and 18 percent of women age eighty-five and over were married. For men, the proportion married also was lower at older ages, but not as low as for older women. Even among the oldest old in 2010, the majority (58 percent) of men were married. Widowhood was more common among older women than among older men in 2010. Women age sixty-five and over were three times as likely as men of the same age to be widowed, 40 percent compared with 13 percent. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of women age eighty-five and over were widowed, compared with 35 percent of men.

Relatively small proportions of older men (9 percent) and women (11 percent) were divorced in 2010. A small proportion (4 percent) of the older population had never married.
1

All but fourteen of the men in my study have children or stepchildren. Among the 93 percent with children, the number of offspring ranges from one to ten. Most common is a family with two children, which was somewhat lower than the average number of children born to married couples nationally in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when my respondents were starting families. (The national average exceeded three children in the 1950s through the mid-1960s, after which it began to drop. From a low point in 1976 when it was 1.7, the average began to climb steadily, reaching 2.06 children in 2012.) More men have children than the women (88 percent of the women do), possibly due to acquiring stepchildren or forming a blended family, or starting a new family when marrying for the second or third time. Although I did not ask the men to tell me how many grandchildren they have, I received this delightful comment from an eighty-two-year-old professor: “Having twenty grandchildren is an assignment as bewilderin’ as it is utterly entrancing!”

One respondent who has devoted himself to family—biological, adopted, and foster—as well as helping other men to be good fathers is Neil Tift. Neil, sixty-five, and his wife, Denise, have two grown children and an adopted teenaged daughter who has special needs. They have been foster parents to many children and adults. Two disabled foster adults currently live with the Tift family. As Father Involvement Program Director at the Child Crisis Center in Mesa, Arizona, Neil strives to teach fathers on and off the reservation about positive parenting and healthy life choices. By including motivated dads in the parenting picture, child abuse and domestic violence can be reduced. Neil appreciates the opportunity “to make the world a better place” at home, at work, and in the community.

Profile: John Neil Tift

Neil Tift is the Father Involvement Program Director at the Child Crisis Center in Mesa, Arizona (the state’s third largest city, located twenty miles east of Phoenix). As a specialist in working with men, his job balances working directly with fathers and developing resources for fathers, such as father-child activities, parenting skills classes, family law clinics, couples workshops, and “boot camp” for new dads. Many of the fathers Neil sees are seeking ways to enhance their skills with and access to their children. Neil and his family moved from Minnesota in 2007 to Mesa because the Native American Fatherhood and Families Association (NAFFA) recruited him to work in the fatherhood program, working with fathers on and off reservations across the state. “There is so much to be done here. Compared to Minnesota, Arizona is terribly underresourced with respect to child and maternal well-being.” And, Neil adds, Arizona doesn’t have the Vikings, his favorite football team.

He also provides training in Arizona and around the United States for professional staff in social service and government agencies, such as Head Start; family service programs; teen parent programs; Offices of Child Support Enforcement; and Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies. He urges them to make their programs more inclusive, more father-friendly, and shares father involvement recruitment and retention strategies, such as how to engage fathers in home visits and strategies to making them feel welcome. He also illustrates the rich nuances of maternal and paternal parenting styles. For example, when a child is crying over something, perhaps losing a ballgame, mom typically will try to soothe the child while the dad’s approach will be to redirect him. Moms encourage expression of emotion. Dads focus on the regulation of emotion. Mom worries about building self-esteem. Dad wants his son to learn sportsmanship and how to handle loss. “Their approaches are merely different; one is not better or worse than the other,” says Neil. Since typical agency staff providing resources for at-risk women and children are predominantly female (often 85 to 100 percent), Neil’s challenge is to get those providers to see
men
and fathers as part of the solution.

Neil made a point of differentiating the purpose of father involvement programs from the goals of fathers’ rights organizations. “The former do not intend to take anything away from moms; rather they try to
include
dads in the parenting picture. The latter, often representing angry white men, try to take certain legal rights and resources away from moms and give them to dads.” He also differentiates anger management programs for men who batter or intimidate women and can’t be trusted with their kids from anger management needed by his clients. “They are dads who are nonviolent though they may drive too fast or yell at the kids or their female partner. They have no legal rights, yet they
do
want to be there for their kids. They prove it by being the ones who show up for a fathers’ program.”

When I asked Neil to cite other evidence that father involvement programs are effective, he mentioned outcome measures such as: self-assessment reports from participants, a reduction in the number of emergency 911 calls to the home, reports from kids about the amount of positive time dad spends with them, and feedback from mom saying she is more comfortable around dad. And, at the agency level, he gets thanked by staff for showing them how they were, inadvertently, keeping men
away and precluding fathers from their service delivery.

Now age sixty-five, Neil is married to Denise, a marriage and family therapist. They have three children—a grown son and daughter from Neil’s first marriage and an adopted teenaged daughter with special needs. They have eleven grandchildren. Neil and Denise have also been foster parents to many children and adults over the past twenty-one years. Two disabled foster adults are part of the Tift family at present.

What drew him into the father involvement field years ago was becoming a single custodial dad after his first marriage ended and discovering firsthand the dearth of resources for fathers who need housing, child care, legal assistance, employment, and other resources. “I would go to agencies whose brochures
said
that they offered assistance to single parents and the staff would tell me that they only provided assistance to single
mothers
and children. Having nowhere to turn, I started a Fathers’ Resource Center in Minneapolis. Denise supported me for almost three years until I got fatherhood programming established there. What started almost as a quirk of fate developed into a trend and now has become a movement.”

With a master’s degree in counseling psychology, Neil has spent his entire professional life working for nonprofits. For twenty-two of those years he has worked in various capacities with fathers. His many career choices include: special education teacher, live-in house parent in a group home for mentally handicapped adults, therapist for men who batter, community organizer, founder and director of a transitional housing program for homeless adults, grant writer, founder of the first Fathers’ Resource Center in the United States, and director of training for three national fatherhood organizations in Washington, DC, and Arizona.

In addition to his current work for the Child Crisis Center, Neil teaches psychology and ethics courses at nearby Chandler-Gilbert Community College and previously at Ottawa University. He travels a fair amount with Denise and their teenaged daughter, Hannah, and they volunteer at a local food pantry on Thursday afternoons. He is an ordained deacon and serves at masses at his Catholic parish where he can preside over baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Another of Neil’s interests is politics. Recently, he got involved in the Obama campaign because, in his opinion, “Democrats and progressives are an endangered species in Arizona!”

Although his position at the Child Crisis Center is far from lucrative, finances are not the reason Neil intends to keep working. He wants to stay busy, and above all, he is motivated to give back. Giving back is one of three life lessons imparted by his hard-working father during Neil’s childhood in Charles City, Iowa: (1) remember that the world doesn’t owe you; you must contribute to make it a better place; (2) always respect women; and (3) yell only at the dog. Neil recalls the selflessness of the Presentation sisters who taught him and his three siblings in parochial school. And he recalls how he considered entering the priesthood when he was in college until he realized that what he really wanted was “to be a
dad
, not a father.”

“I can make a difference in a small field that has too few service providers and very limited status or visibility.” Even so, his contributions have not gone unnoticed: Neil has won the “Spirit of Fatherhood” and “Father of the Year” awards for his work in Minnesota, Maryland, and Arizona. He wants to encourage men with passion for the work to go into fields such as early childhood education, where they can contribute to the healthy development of boys and girls. “It is not enough to
talk
about ending child abuse and domestic violence. Men have to
live
it and share it,” he insists. It gives Neil great satisfaction to know that his own son, Zack, is working with young fathers at Catholic Charities in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Neil expects to keep working until his health won’t permit it. For now, he enjoys getting up and going out for a run five days a week. “Part of that is an inability to sleep in the morning, and part is looking forward to doing work I really care about. I feel very lucky.”

The recession took a toll on the Tifts. They had a hard time selling their home in Minnesota in 2007 and had to sell it at a significant loss. Then the owner of the house they first rented in Mesa cheated them out of the money they put down toward the purchase of her house, and they lost their home. This was on top of a series of serious setbacks for the family from which they seem to have emerged stronger and more resilient. Perhaps this was an echo of Neil’s childhood experience of small-town prejudice against his family’s devout Catholicism, about which he simply says, “Our faith made us stronger.”