Wednesday, January 17, 2007
What Ever happened To Having Enough Time?
About eight years ago I was doing a doctoral research project and this is what came about from the many interviews and frustrated patients I queried. The following article was printed in The Arizona Networking News some time in Y2K.
What ever happened to having enough time to be with your loved ones, or completing that college degree you always wanted? These are some of the pressing questions my patients are bringing up in their therapy sessions. Recently, TIME became the common denominator for deep discussion within a group doing research on annoying changes in our fast paced American society.
Family ties in our hyper-busy culture are disappearing and being replaced with outside jobs. The quest for more money has long been an issue with American families. So many mothers are working these days as shown by current statistics, that their children think the nanny is mommy. Daddy, if he living with his wife and family, is also working very hard to locate our American material dreams. Sometimes he has more than one job. Can you tell me what miraculous wonders and happiness have derived from all this working for more and more money? In fact, have Americans ever been in so much debt before?
Our children frequently are abandoned emotionally with only a television to baby-sit for them. The parents come home from working all day so tired they want to fall on the bed and do nothing more than to snore. Who has time and strength to parent anymore? What percent of our families have a stay at home mom in these times? We frequently rely upon complete strangers so often for babysitting services. Some lucky people still do have loving relatives to watch their babies. But.... this is not common.
The loving relatives are also out there looking for more money. One day these overly busy parents will grow old. Their children will place them in a nursing home facility for care. Why? So glad you asked! ;) Because they have learned very well the lessons their overly busy parents have taught them. The grown children are simply too busy to care for an infirmed parent. Why? Because they are out there looking for more money, possibly holding down more than one job. Or.... "You did not have time for me, Mommy and Daddy, when I was young. Why then should I have time for your needs when you are old?"
