The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Where the feeling is right, and both generations reasonable and just, there are still many problems of adjustment arising from an attempt to bring either or both parents of the married couple into the same household. The first problem is that of the financial support. It ought not to be the case that any aged couple or any widowed father or mother should be left wholly dependent upon their children. The demand for better economic provision for the aged is one of the most vital and pressing of social needs. The difficulty of taking care of the father and mother when the children are coming on with pressing needs of their own is felt acutely in cases of narrow income. The call is almost universal to provide more adequately for grandparents. How can we meet this call?

The Financial Provision for Old Age.—In the case of those whose earning capacity is not equal to saving a sufficient old-age provision while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and the employing business in which the man or woman has worked, or it may be a threefold provision contributed to from the savings of the laborer, the quota from the employer, and the state subsidy. Since no insurance system that discourages thrift, or fails to encourage it, is socially sound, the latter seems the best ideal. There may be, in addition, or as a substitute, a family provision on the plan so well suggested by Mr. Taber in his book, The Business of the Household, a plan that calls for the definite setting apart of an "Old-age Fund," to which each child shall contribute in the years when he is earning most, not as a gift but as a "deferred payment," as it were, for all that the parents give in childhood. To this Old-age Fund any savings of the father and mother may be added until a sufficient sum is secured for comfortable care in old age. Mr. Taber indicates that at least five dollars out of every twenty-five saved should be thus assigned and invested only in the safest manner and held inviolate, no matter what the temporary needs of the family may be, until the work-time has passed. Whatever plan may be adopted, it is certain that family well-being and the happiness of the aged alike call for a better and more adequate old-age provision.

The laborers who earn less than the required sum for a decent standard of life for father, mother, and children cannot, of course, make any provision for their own old age or care for dependent parents. In such families the public institutions or privately endowed and managed "Homes for the Aged" offer the only and often a comfortable and sometimes a happy place for the grandparents. The movement for this social care of the aged has many phases. In some countries, as in The Danish Care of the Aged, so well described by Edith Sellers in her book of that name, there is a far more complete and generous use of public funds than we have in the United States, a possibility of careful grading of persons in appropriate groups, and a removal of the crushing sense of public charity which those of English ancestry so often feel when obliged "to go upon the town;" yet this leaves much to be desired.[6]

In the grade of economic condition above that in which it is a dire struggle to make both ends meet for the husband, wife, and their little children, there are to be considered five ways in which the care of the aged can be made adequate and not too great a burden upon those of young and those of middle life.

Needed Ways of Preparing for Old Age.—First: There must be devised, as indicated above, better and surer ways of insurance, savings, and pensions, by which the grandparents can be made more or less independent even in families of limited means.

Second: There must he measures established for the prevention of premature old age, measures operating in health and in labor-power to prolong self-dependence by means of individual earnings, to the fullest extent possible.

Third: There must be for men, as for women, provision in vocational training by which each person may have in reserve some light and interesting form of activity, possibly of earning value, which may serve as occupation when strenuous work is outgrown.

Fourth: There must be a clearer understanding of the mutual obligations of parents and children so that the care of the aged may seem more often, what it really is in most cases, not a charity from within the family circle, to be passed around with jealous eye for just distribution of family burdens within the group of children, but a family debt, for the payment of which early and constant provision must be made by all members of the family during the years of largest earning power. If the grandparents have had a chance to save enough to pay all their own share of the family expense to the end of life, well and good. If, on the contrary, as is so often the case (now that the social standard for child-care and child-education has risen to such heights of parental requirement), the parents, now old, have spent so lavishly on the schooling and marriage setting up of their sons and daughters that they have not been able to save for themselves, then the obligation of the children is clear and the grandparents should never feel themselves pensioners.

Fifth: Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power, should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also will resist the decay of powers and be able to keep young when the years tell of many birthdays.

To go over these points with greater detail: The first requirement, namely, to make sure that all possible financial provision is made for grandparents while they are yet young and capable enough in their work to save, is one that is more and more recognized. Moreover, the tendency in every country is increasingly toward state recognition of the duty of society toward its aged members. The proposition of Victor Berger, then the solitary socialistic member of the Congress of the United States, to pension every person over the age of sixty is one that will hardly be carried into effect. The objection, however, to much existing pensioning by the state which this blanket proposition was intended to offset is that its benefits are mostly for those near the poverty line or below it and hence may be and often is a discouragement to thrift and self-dependence rather than an aid to individual effort.