THE SANDWICH GENERATION
parents will need assistance over a longer
period of time than ever before.
There are actually new designations
for different categories of the elderly. The
dramatic increase in the number of people
reaching age 65, coupled with their in-
creased life expectancy, has expanded the
classification into the following groups:
• The “Young Old” Ages 65-74
• The “Old” Ages 74-84
• The “Oldest Old” Ages 85+
Squeezed Between Caring For
Your Children & Your Aging Parents
F
— by Michele Miller
or as long as there have been
families, people have always
had to find ways to take care
of their aging relatives. In generations
past, it was common for extended fami-
lies to live in the same town, perhaps just
a few blocks from one another. Every-
one was able to help out when parents or
grandparents needed care.
Things are different today. In our
highly mobile society, it is less common
for children to remain in the town where
they grew up. Rather than a large extend-
ed family living in close proximity, we of-
ten find family members scattered across
the country, making a network of family
support much more difficult.
Add to this factor the trend for to-
day’s couples to wait longer to have chil-
dren and you can begin to see why the
term “Sandwich Generation” was coined
in reference to people who are still car-
ing for their children while also bearing
the responsibilities involved in caring for
their aging parents.
In 1970, the average age of a wom-
an having her first baby was 21.4 years.
In 1990, statistics showed that women
weren’t even marrying until the median
age of 26.7 years. In 2017, the median
26 WNY Family March 2019
age of a woman giving birth to her first
child was 28 years, and the median age
for women marrying rose to 27.4 years
and 29.5 years for men. (Keep in mind
that “median” means 50% of marriages
occur at an age above that number; and
50% occur below.) Not included in these
statistics are those who have a child but
don’t actually marry. And, since 2000, 46
states and Washington, DC have experi-
enced a rise in first-birth rates for women
over age 35.
According to the Pew Research Cen-
ter, motherhood for college-educated
women doesn’t start until women reach
some level of career success in their thir-
ties, with fully one-fifth not becoming
mothers until they were at least 35 years
old.
So, what does this have to do with
eldercare, you ask?
The resulting trend in delayed mar-
riage and childbirth has given rise to new
generations of adults who will be caught
in the squeeze between the needs of their
growing children and their increasingly
frail parents. And those parents are now
living longer — the fastest growing seg-
ment of the U.S. population is people
over 85 years of age. That means elderly
WNY Family’s very first annual El-
derCare Guide appeared 16 years ago as
a result of what I was experiencing as a
result of my own parents’ needs, and they
lived 500 miles away. My father’s health
declined over a period of 7 years and my
mother, 8 years younger than my father,
was his primary caregiver.
My brother, who is my only sibling,
lived downstairs from my parents, and
helped tremendously with doctors’ ap-
pointments, picking up prescriptions, car-
rying in groceries, and managing all the
household chores and repairs that used to
be done by my father.
My mother had promised my father
that she would never put him in a nursing
home — something professional advisers
say never to do — and she managed to
fulfill her promise, but at the expense of
her own health.
After my father’s death at age 88 in
2007, after 4 years of quite ill health, my
mom only had two reasonably good years
before her own health began to seriously
deteriorate. She passed away under Hos-
pice Care in 2013 at age 86. Between the
two of them, thirteen years of caregiving
were involved.
Living a day’s drive away, during
those years I always had a bag packed
and ready to go on a moment’s notice for
situations when one or the other of them
needed care after hospitalization. I was
in charge of deciphering and filling out
any necessary medical paperwork and
communicating with doctors, home care
aides, visiting nurses, etc. On visits home,
I de-cluttered and re-organized kitchen
cupboards and bedroom closets so my
mother, who was bent over from spinal
stenosis pain, could reach things more
easily. After a fall, I bought my father a