finances – The Zion Chronicle

When I saw a link to an article titled 5 Ways Retirement Is Different For Women I hoped to see a profound insight or two in the article. Unfortunately what I got was proof of how broken our cultural views are related to families. There’s no way to argue the facts behind the 5 points in the article:

Women live longer.
Women are more likely to fly solo in their later years.
Stepping out of the work force is easy; stepping back in is not.
Retired women are poorer than retired men.
Part-time work rarely leads to a solid retirement.

The point of #3 is that women pay an ongoing price if they step out of the workforce to rear children. My immediate thought was, “great, let’s keep convincing women that raising children is a burden on their lives.” When it went on to say that taking time to care for aging parents can be even worse financially than taking time to raise children it clearly suggested that families are a financial burden.

Points 4 and 5 were really sad because they would be completely non-issues if we had a culture of lasting marriages rather than a culture of disposable marriages. As I thought how lasting marriages would affect each of these points I realized that healthy, loving families mitigate all five issues listed in the article. Let’s see how.

In order to establish a healthy family it is necessary to meet basic physical needs. Nothing else can compensate for gaps in those needs being met and when they have not been met for a family it is difficult if not impossible to focus on other areas of need in building a healthy family. This is a concern that can be addressed at the level of individual families but also at a community level.

When we speak of physical needs in a prosperous nation like the United States we are generally speaking of financial needs because everything to meet our physical needs is generally available so long as someone has the money to acquire them.