Retirement

Modern life can be viewed as calling for a predictable series of developmental stages. Donald E. Super, a vocational psychologist, has identified five, each one named for its main activity: growth, exploration, establishment, management, and disengagement. Development through these stages requires a series of transitions: from childhood to school, from school to employment (and/or marriage and parenthood), then to increasingly responsible jobs, and finally to retirement.

Up until the 20th century, the notion of retirement as we now know it hardly existed. Most people simply worked until they could not anymore. But in the early 1900s, certain occupations—teachers, municipal workers, and especially police officers and firefighters—sought mandatory retirement and benefits. In 1935, the U.S. Federal Government passed the Social Security Act, which paid benefits to all workers who had reached the age of 65. (The actual law and its modifications since that time are greatly more complex than this simple statement.) At that time there were about 7 million men and women age 65 and older. In 2000, the number was closer to 35 million. Presently, the population surge of retiring baby boomers will swell this number. Clearly, retirement has become a significant aspect of modern life.

There are a number of issues to be considered in the transition to retirement. Finances typically receive serious attention, since for many people retirement means reduced income. Health, complicated by the simple process of aging, is probably the second-ranking retirement issue. Another issue that is gaining attention is use of time—the opportunity to do whatever one wants: traveling, grandparenting, renewing old hobbies, volunteering, continuing education, and even a new career, among other things.

Counseling Psychologist Nancy Schlossberg has studied retirees and sees coping with the retirement transition as depending on a number of variables: financial security and health, of course, but also the role that employment and careers has played in the life of the individual and his or her family, at what age one retires, whether the individual has liked his or her career, and the degree of planning for retirement, among many others.

More importantly, Schlossberg has found a number of ways of dealing with retirement. Among them is one she calls “continuers,” which is Schlossberg herself, who exchanged her professorship in adult and career development for her present role as a retirement transition facilitator. Another role is the “easy glider,” who doesn't plan, but simply lets each day of retirement unfold. There are also “adventurers,” who start entirely new activities—a new career, a commitment to a volunteer cause, earning a degree that was not achieved earlier, researching one's family history, and the like.

Overall, the transition to retirement merits careful thought and attention to possibilities—and opportunity for the counseling profession.