The Job/Family Challenge

If you have a job and children or have to care for an elderly relative or a partner who's ill,you know what the challenge is.It's the daily struggle to balance the often competing demands of your work and home lives,without putting either one at risk.Most of us can identify with the exhaustion of "trying to do it all". While the workforce has changed drastically-more than our mothers imagined-the workplace has not.

The most dramatic change in the workforce in recent years has been growing number of women,including mothers of young children,employed outside the home.This transformation has affected workforce.Yet if you're responsible for both a family and a jjob,you know that most workplace have changed very little to accommodate the realities of their workers' live.

These statistics show the extent of the changes:

For the first time in history,most families don't have a wife/mother at home full ti ... Read more »

by Carol Moore

It was a day like the day before and the day after. The wind wrapped itself around the sod cabin in gusting moans as the pioneer family within carried out their tasks pretending not to hear. They heard the wind, however. It had been their constant companion on the open plains since their journey from Philadelphia two years before in the spring of 1865. Following the covered wagon train of ten, the wind had lifted the drab landscape into billows of dust falling on everyone and everything until there seemed but one color and one sound.

Now Rachel sat on the bed hand-stitching a quilt while her mother hunched over a sewing machine across the room rocking her feet backwards and forwards on a foot treadle that turned the shaft that moved the needle. The thumping counter pointed the wind outside. Laughter and giggling erupted from Rachel's younger brother and sister playing jacks on the floor and it brought a smile to their sister's face, but ... Read more »