This article in the American CNN Money magazine touches on a problem people are encountering in the UK too. While “we all want our parents to stay healthy and live to be 100, the fact that so many more are sticking around than in previous generations is putting unanticipated financial pressure on their adult children”.
In the US “60-year-old kids” are having to care for parents, children and sometimes also grandchildren simultaneously. Today 49 per cent of Americans in their sixties have at least one parent who is still alive. At the beginning of the 20th century the proportion was between 4 and 7 percent.
This more scholarly article from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reckons that about nine percent of American women aged 45 to 56 are giving significant amounts of care to both their children and their parents, and can thus be considered members of the sandwich generation.
They are sandwiched between their elderly parents, who need regular visits and sometimes also financial assistance, and their own children, who often need the same.
Many also have another layer in their sandwich if their children need a ‘granny nanny’, so they may end up looking after the grandchildren too.
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