The sandwich generation: caught between your children and your parents

It is twenty to eight. In the back seat your son is complaining that he has forgotten his PE shoes, and your phone lights up with »Mum«. You don’t answer, because every time you don’t answer, you wonder whether she has fallen. So you answer. She hasn’t fallen. The doctor has just changed her tablets and she doesn’t know whether to take the new one in the morning or in the evening. Between the traffic lights and the school car park you try to explain, while your son sighs loudly behind you because he is going to be late. When you drop him off, you realise you promised a report at work that you haven’t even started. And that you haven’t had so much as a coffee yet today.

None of this is a disaster. But all of it together is a day that repeats itself. And when it repeats for months and years, something in a person slowly wears thin.

This is what is called the sandwich generation: people in midlife who are still responsible for their children and already responsible for their ageing parents. In this post I won’t write mainly about time management — there are enough lists about that already. I will write about what happens in a family when care shifts: who takes it on, which loyalties wake up along the way, and why the feeling of being trapped often runs deeper than an overfull schedule.

Where the name comes from and why it fits so many people

The term was introduced into the professional literature in 1981 by the social worker Dorothy Miller. She noticed that the adult children of older people carry a burden nobody sees: they give upwards and downwards, while receiving almost nothing themselves. In the same year the gerontologist Elaine Brody published an article whose title became shorthand for this position — Women in the Middle. Why women? Because then — and to a large extent still today — care for parents was quietly expected above all from daughters and daughters-in-law.

How many people are in this position today depends on how we define it. In 2013 the American Pew Research Center found that 47 per cent of adults in their forties and fifties had a parent aged 65 or older while also raising a minor child or financially supporting a grown one. I don’t know a comparable figure for Slovenia reliably enough to quote it, but I do know the story repeats itself: we have children later, parents live longer, and two stages of life that used to be separate increasingly overlap.

It matters that the thing has a name. The people I talk to often say something like: »It’s nothing special, everyone does it.« True, many people do. But the fact that something is common doesn’t mean it is easy. A name helps turn private helplessness into a recognisable life situation — one with patterns that can be understood.

It’s not only about time: loyalty in two directions

When the media mention the sandwich generation, they usually talk about hours: how many go to parents, how many to children, how many to work. The hours are real. But in family therapy we also look at something else — what happens to loyalties.

The Hungarian-American psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy wrote about families as systems of invisible ledgers. Each of us received something from our parents — life, care, sometimes wounds too — and carries a sense of what we owe in return. At the same time we carry a responsibility towards our own children, to whom we owe what we ourselves did (or did not) receive. As long as parents are healthy and children are small, these two directions don’t collide. When parents become frail, a question begins that hardly anyone says out loud: whom do I owe more?

That question is the core of feeling trapped. It isn’t just that you have no time. It is that every hour you give your mother sounds inside you like an hour taken from your son, and the other way round. When you are with one, guilt towards the other calls you. That is why people in the sandwich often can’t rest even when they do have time — because time without duties fills up with thoughts of where they ought to be.

Who in the family becomes the one who cares

It rarely happens that a family sits down and decides together who will look after Mum. Usually it just happens — and precisely because it just happens, it is so hard to change.

Care most often falls to whoever lives closest, to the one who »always knew how to handle Mum«, or to a daughter. But it often falls to the person who already played this role in childhood. If as a child you were the one who minded your younger siblings, comforted your mother after arguments or made sure nothing at home fell apart, it is very likely that now, too, you will be the first to pick up the phone. In the knowledge base I describe this under parentification — when a child takes on care that should rest on the shoulders of adults.

This role has its value and its price. The value is that you know what to do and that your parent trusts you. The price is that others in the family very quickly stop noticing how much work you do — because you have always done it. I wrote about how roles get distributed in a family and why they persist so stubbornly in Siblings, alliances and coalitions: the invisible geometry of a family. More concretely, what to do when you are left alone with the care is covered in When your brother or sister won’t help care for your parents.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we don’t look for someone to blame for this arrangement. We ask which pattern is continuing. If in your family care was always a woman’s job, if needs were never spoken about, or if asking for help was shameful, all of that will show up right now — at the moment when there is the most care to give.

Children are watching how you care

People in the sandwich often feel guilty because their children »suffer« from the time that goes to their grandparents. Sometimes that is true. A child who hears for months that Mum has no time because she has to go to Grandma’s may begin to feel they come second. That is worth noticing and talking about.

At the same time, children also see something no lesson can teach them: how a family deals with frailty. They see whether Grandma’s illness is talked about or hidden. They see whether Mum takes a break or wears herself out completely. They see whether their parents support each other through it or argue. They will carry all of this into their own family one day — including when you are the one who needs help.

So the question is not only how much time children lose. It is also what they learn. A child doesn’t need protecting from the fact that Grandad is ill. But they do need a clear explanation suited to their age, and a sense that it won’t swallow them. Just take care that your child doesn’t become your main confidant or your helper with nursing care — that could repeat the very pattern you may recognise from your own childhood.

The partner who ends up last on the list

There is one layer of the sandwich that people overlook most often: the couple relationship. Parents have urgent needs, children have urgent needs, work has deadlines. A partner, though, is a grown-up who will surely understand. And they do understand — for a while. Then they start to feel they live with someone who is physically at home but always somewhere else in their thoughts.

The conversation might sound something like this (composed, not a real person):

»Going to your mum’s again? You were there yesterday.«
»Yes, because nobody else was there yesterday. What should I do, leave her on her own?«
»I didn’t say that. I just said you’re not here.«
»I don’t think you understand what it’s like for me.«
»Maybe I don’t. Because you don’t tell me. You just leave.«

In this short exchange two kinds of loneliness meet. She is lonely in the caring, he is lonely in the relationship. Neither is being unkind, but both are hurt. When a couple finds itself here, it helps to know that they are not really arguing about whether she should go to her mother’s. They are arguing about whether they are still in this together. How caring for parents shifts things in a couple is covered in Caring for ageing parents and your relationship: what shifts between you. If old tensions with your in-laws resurface along the way, you may find In-laws and boundaries: families of origin in a relationship helpful.

Growing up alongside a parent who is growing old

Back in the 1960s the gerontologist Margaret Blenkner introduced the term filial maturity. She used it to describe the moment when an adult child first truly sees their parent as a person who needs support — and no longer as someone who gives it. She didn’t mean a role reversal in which the child becomes the parent’s parent. She meant a new form of relationship in which an adult child can help without losing themselves or reducing their parent to a child.

This is a developmental task, not only a logistical one. And it requires you to face something difficult within yourself: the parent who was once big is now small. People with a good relationship with their parents feel sadness at this. People with a hard history with their parents often feel a mixture — sadness, anger, relief and guilt about the relief. All of it is normal. If this theme interests you more broadly, I wrote about it in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

At exactly this point another loss often hides in the sandwich: the loss of the parent who once helped you. When your children were small, perhaps it was your mother who came to babysit. Now there is no one left to help you, while you help everyone. That shift deserves to be grieved, even if no one talks about it.

When it isn’t time pulling you apart, but guilt

People in the sandwich rarely come to a therapist because of an overfull schedule. They come because of what that schedule does to them: irritability, sleeplessness, the sense of being a bad parent, a bad son or daughter and a bad partner all at once. Often they are the kind of people I wrote about in Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out — those who always cope, until suddenly they don’t.

Guilt in the sandwich has a particular shape: it isn’t guilt about something you did, but about what you cannot do. You can’t be at a parents’ evening and in A&E at the same time. You can’t give your mother back her youth. You can’t give your son a mum who isn’t tired. Because you can’t, you feel guilty. And because you feel guilty, you don’t allow yourself a break.

It can help to start thinking about boundaries — not as walls, but as a clear answer to the question of what I can give without losing myself. A boundary isn’t »I won’t visit Mum any more«. A boundary can be »on Wednesdays I go, on Saturdays my brother goes, on Sundays I’m with the children«. If you already notice signs that you are running out of strength as a parent too, read Parental burnout: always available and never enough.

Practical help isn’t a sign that you have failed, either. The first port of call for health questions is your parent’s family doctor, who can also refer them to the community nursing service, which makes home visits. For questions about home help, care and the entitlements your parent has — or that you have as a relative — contact the local social work centre. Rules change, so check the details there rather than on forums. A single conversation with someone who knows the system often saves weeks of wandering.

Exercise: a map of your caring

This exercise takes about twenty minutes. You need a sheet of paper and a little quiet — ideally in the evening, once the children are in bed.

1. Draw yourself in the middle of the page. Around you, write everything you currently look after: parents, children, partner, work, perhaps someone else. Next to each, write what you concretely do for them in a week.
2. Next to each task, mark whether it can only be done by the person doing it now. Bathing your child before bed, perhaps. Buying and delivering medicines, perhaps not.
3. Along the edge, write down everyone who could take something on — siblings, partner, neighbours, friends, children of a suitable age, public services. Don’t think yet about whether they will want to.
4. Choose a single task that you will offer to someone this week. Not everything. One. And say it concretely: »Could you take Mum to the doctor on Thursday?«
5. At the bottom of the page, write one thing that is just yours — a twenty-minute walk, coffee with a friend, an evening without your phone. Write it down as if it were as important as everything else. Because it is.

If this exercise brings up the question of why the split in your family is exactly as it is, that can be a good start for a deeper conversation. One option is the longer session A Look into the Past, in which we draw a genogram together and look at how care has been passed down through the generations in your family. I also work with English-speaking clients.

Where this view isn’t enough

I want to be honest: the systemic view isn’t the answer to everything.

Sometimes the problem isn’t family roles but genuine scarcity. If there are no siblings, if your partner is ill, if there is no money for home help or the waiting list for a care home is too long, no conversation about loyalties will add hours to the day. Then finding concrete help matters more than understanding the pattern.

Sometimes the right answer is to do less. Not all care is your task. If the relationship with your parent was violent or neglectful, you have the right not to take on the role of carer — or to take it on only in part. That isn’t selfishness. It is a decision you are allowed to make.

Sometimes exhaustion grows into something more. If you have been sleeping badly for weeks, have no appetite, feel that nothing makes sense, or your thoughts drift to it being better if you weren’t here, this is no longer just the sandwich. Then see your family doctor. In a crisis you can call the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia, Zaupni telefon Samarijan, on 116 123 at any time, or at night Klic v duševni stiski in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00; in an emergency call 112.

What to remember

• The sandwich generation are people caring for their children and their ageing parents at the same time — and there are more of them than we think.
• Feeling trapped isn’t only a lack of time, but a collision of two loyalties: to those who gave to you and to those you give to.
• Care usually falls to whoever carried it before. The split is worth saying out loud and changing.
• Children learn from this how a family deals with frailty — and your partner needs to know they are still part of it.
• Practical help (family doctor, community nursing, social work centre) is not defeat but part of caring.