The “Sandwich Generation” Are Who We Need To Be Helping Out

People raising kids + dealing with elderly parents, simultaneously. There are 80 million such people in the U.S. alone.

If you are unfamiliar with the term “Sandwich Generation” and cannot figure it out via context clues, here is a good article describing the basics:

The dual challenge of the "sandwich generation": Raising children while caring for aging parents

Essentially, you are “sandwiched” between “I have younger kids” and “My parents are becoming older and need help.” This applies to about 80 million people in the U.S., and the idea of a “Sandwich Generation” is only scaling, because people do get married + have kids later, for various reasons.

The number one quote in that article above would be this:

“At a certain point, your parents become like kids,” Ling said.

Indeed.

Years ago, I was in this church group and, as we sat on one couple’s lawn, this towering intellect of a man who turned out to not be such a good friend to me said: “You know what’s weird? As your kids age, your parents age too.” That’s not weird, per se. It’s just numbers going up at the same time. You could call it “math.” But what he was describing, ostensibly, was being part of the Sandwich Generation.

Let’s take the obvious part first: there is an exhaustion element to dealing with a young child and then your older mom all at once. If you wanted 3–4 kids and you land in Sandwich Generation, you might only have 1–2 kids because you’re so exhausted from dealing with completely different eras of life that are oddly the same in terms of how limited you are (newborn + elderly). So that brings down the fertility rate.

There’s also an issue of money. Maybe your elderly parents had a nest egg and they didn’t burn it on cruises. Maybe they have some government cheese. But a lot of people don’t have enough money to live until 90, even if they think they do, and that creates economic stressors…