The Recipe for Happy, Retired Husbands--.

Go Back to Work!

RETIRED MEN WHO return to work report the highest morale and lowest levels of depression--especially if their wives remain at home--compared with other couples, both working and retired, according to a new college study.

Recently retired stay-at-home wives, though, seem to have difficulty adjusting to retirement if their husbands aren't also at home; these women experience jumps in depressive symptoms compared with recently retired women whose husbands have also retired and haven't gone back to work.

But the lowest morale and highest rates of depression are experienced by men who decide to make retirement permanent. All these links to morale and depression are regardless of age, income, and health.

"These findings suggest that late-midlife men appear to be more satisfied with their lives when they are retired and reemployed, especially when their spouses follow traditional gender role patterns," say psychologists/sociologists Jungmeen E. Kim and Phyllis Moen. "Men who are free from the demands of their career jobs but are reemployed are happiest, probably because they are working by choice and part-time," they say.

The two researchers studied 534 married men and women between the ages of 50 and 74 in upstate New York who were either retired for a long time, newly retired, or soon-to-be retired. Their study is unique in that it looks not only at the retirement transition period but also at how working after retirement contributes to life quality. Retirement was defined as being eligible for or receiving a pension from one's career employer and/or receiving social security.

"We do not see retirement as a one-way, onetime, irreversible exit from paid work," says Moen, the Ferris Family Professor of Life Course Studies, the director of the Cornell Retirement and Wellbeing Study, and the co-director of the Cornell Gerontology Research Institute. "Paid work following retirement--usually part-time and by choice--is an increasingly common phenomenon. Many retirees go on to new careers or are rehired as consultants by their old employers."