Thirty-five million Americans are living beyond the age of sixty-five, a twenty-five year increase in life expectancy since 1900. This longevity, once the gift of a few, has become the destiny of many. This time of life is not just about retiring; in fact many who retire return happily to some type of employment. It is a new stage of life filled with its own unique challenges and opportunities. Co-authors Jane Thayer and Peggy Thayer, a mother-daughter team of psychologists, have named this stage of life, 'elderescence.'
The latest book in the "Health/Medicine and the Faith Tradition" Series developed by the Park Ridge Center of Chicago. This volume focuses on the wide-ranging evangelical tradition and provides an evangelical understanding and proposal regarding faith, sin and suffering, the question of theodicy, sexuality and morality, cleanliness, prayer and healing, and aging and dying.
The most compelling book ever written on personal transition and transformation. --James M. Kouzes, coauthor of The Leadership Challenge Designed for adults who wish to establish a life course, manage changes, and engage in lifelong learning, The Adult Years is an important guide for self-renewal and reorientation. Frederic Hudson's study is a fresh and thoughful approach to adult life. It explores how adults can design meaningful lives that flow, with intelligence and flexibility, through these changing and uncertain times.
Working Daughter provides a roadmap for women trying to navigate caring for aging parents and their careers. Using the author’s own experiences as a prime example, it’s ideal for readers who want straight talk and real advice about the challenges and rewards of eldercare while managing a career and family.
Finalist, Books for a Better Life Award: “A terrific read that offers parents a new way of thinking and being after their last child leaves home.” —Guy Winch, PhD, author of Emotional First Aid Parents make an enormous emotional and financial investment in raising their children. But children grow up. They move out. They create their own lives and their own homes—and the role of the parent changes, diminishes, and evolves. This life phase has no official name, yet it represents a profound shift from the rigors of daily parenting to a period of self-reflection and reorientation. In this book, Wendy Aronsson centers on that experience, capturing the realities of the emotions and life changes that come on gradually, and sometimes proceed in fits and starts. Refeathering the Empty Nestis for any parent preparing for a grown child’s departure from home and wanting to move forward productively, both in their changed parenting role and in their roles as spouse, employee, friend, neighbor, and self. Using real stories throughout, Aronsson shows how people have managed these changes, how they’ve reignited the passion in their marriages or moved on from bad matches, how they’ve rediscovered old interests and talents, and how they’ve reinvented their relationships with their children as well. These stories provide hope and guidance to anyone whose nest is about to empty, as well as those whose nests already are.
Using the Akan in Ghana as a paradigmatic African representative group, African Spirituality: On Becoming Ancestors, Third Edition offers a unique African developmental praxis to eternal life immortality. Indeed, this way of life is predicated on the awareness and application of certain intrinsic values, which, if followed, lead to eternal life. As a way of living, African spirituality begins when an individual becomes morally and ethically responsible for one’s own actions while engaged on an ethical path (Ɔbra Bↄ) in pursuance of one’s unique career endeavor (Nkrabea). Though an individual quest, society is, however, the arbiter of one’s ethical and moral life, when society confers on the person adjudged a success the stage title of Nana. At old age, Ɔbra Bↄ ends as an active endeavor. However, as repositories of wisdom, senior elders continue to inculcate in succeeding generations the principles, art, and mastery of ideal life (Ɔbra pa). Then upon death, senior elders are transformed into deities, bequeathing to living descendants names worthy of evocation and worship. Indeed, this book is the first study of its kind to draw on the experiences of an entire people, their psychological dispositions and effects on the Akan during adulthood. Thus, this book brings a unique perspective to the study of spirituality, religion, developmental psychological theory, what it means to achieve perfection as an elder on earth, and upon death join the esteemed company of the Nananom Nsamanfo (Ancestors).
Paradox for Life Review explains how three different bases for self-esteem affect the accuracy of self-esteem as the lens through which older adults view their reminiscences. James J. Magee describes how life review groups have used paradoxes drawn from poetry, drama, word play, intergenerational family dynamics, Eastern and Western mystical traditions, and personal life experiences to enable members to discover new ways to accept their histories with compassion and wisdom.
Petey the puppy has one wish for Christmas: to have a boy of his very own. But boys are in short supply this year, and he can't seem to find one who is just right!