ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the subjective implications of policy issues. It aims to connect such issues as intergenerational conflict, multiracial integration, child care, and long-term care with the subjective, personal responses persons make when dealing with these issues and their own aging. The chapter also focuses on the issues of: accepting an intergenerational society; integrating a multiracial population base; providing health and longterm care; and child care and women in the workforce. It provides the challenge of incorporating the politics of the life cycle into a national policy agenda in need of interdisciplinary scientific support. The politics of the life cycle center on changes in public values and attitudes about aging, race, and gender. Child care policies have important consequences which affect people at the social psychological level. To control hospital costs, a new system of prospective payment for hospital care was developed.
