The Sandwich Generation

Contents

1. How many people are in it
2. What the care costs
3. The siblings and the questions

Brent O’Mara has sat with clients through the harder transitions, deaths in the family among them, and one transition with a name of its own is the stretch of years when a person is responsible for a parent and a child at once. Pew Research Center defines the sandwich generation for survey purposes as adults who have a living parent aged 65 or older and either a child under 18, an adult child they have supported financially in the past year, or both.¹ The term is older than the survey. A 2010 New York Times parenting column traced a refinement of it to the writer Carol Abaya, who coined the club sandwich generation for the added layers, parents in their fifties and sixties worrying about frail parents as well as children and grandchildren, and parents in their thirties and forties caring for young children, aging parents and elderly grandparents all at once.⁵

How many people are in it

Pew’s September 2025 survey put a quarter of American adults in the group, up slightly from 23 percent in 2021. Age is the strongest predictor: 54 percent of people in their forties qualify, 45 percent of those in their fifties, 25 percent in their thirties, 10 percent of those sixty and over and 8 percent of adults under thirty. The share in their fifties has grown since 2021, from 36 to 45 percent, partly because more of them now have a living parent past 65. Nine in ten sandwiched adults in their thirties have a minor child, while 61 percent of those in their fifties and 89 percent of those sixty and over are sandwiched between a parent and an adult child they have helped financially. One finding runs against the name’s connotation: sandwiched adults were more likely than others to say they were very satisfied with their family life, 48 percent against 43, and the gap was widest in the forties.¹ The Minnesota Star Tribune adds that nearly 70 percent of sandwiched adults work for pay.⁴

Figure

Share of adults in the sandwich generation, by age

• Under 308
• In their 30s25
• In their 40s54
• In their 50s45
• 60 and older10

What the care costs

The costs are measured in time, health and money. Pew’s larger caregiving survey of adults polled in September 2025, 8,750 of them, found that 10 percent of all adults consider themselves a caregiver for a parent 65 or older, rising to 24 percent among those who have such a parent and to 31 percent where the parent is 75 or older. Women are more likely than men to be caregivers, 28 percent against 23, and lower income adults far more likely than upper income ones, 39 percent against 16. About two thirds of those caring for a parent help regularly with at least one of four tasks: errands, housework or repairs, which 52 percent do; managing health care, 42 percent; managing finances such as budgeting and paying bills, 39 percent; and personal care such as bathing, 16 percent. Asked what the work had done to their lives, these caregivers said it had improved their relationship with the parent, 56 percent positive against 16 negative, but had hurt their emotional well being, physical health, social life, finances and careers, with women reporting the emotional and physical toll far more often than men.² The money shows up in homes. The Washington Post reported in 2020 on a daughter in Atlanta who listed her father’s house, received offers including one for $110,000, and pulled it off the market so he could stay, a decision the paper used to show how keeping a parent at home preserves the parent’s wealth and independence while the work and worry fall on the next generation.³ A public television documentary collected the portraits: a Wisconsin teacher who spent at least three hours a day on her parents’ care and reckoned she had devoted more time to her parents than to raising her own children; a Minneapolis son whose wife left her job to care for the son’s mother while he worked longer hours, and who said the work became 80 percent of his life; a daughter in Minnesota who moved home from a political career in Washington and gave up travel to be near a mother with early onset dementia.⁷

Figure

What caring for a parent does to the caregiver

emotional well being, against 28 percent positive

39 percent

social life, against 15 percent positive

36 percent

physical health, against 19 percent positive

33 percent

financial situation, against 18 percent positive

32 percent

The siblings and the questions

Care is rarely one person’s job. A guide published by PBS NewsHour describes the visit home at which adult children first notice a parent’s frailty, the different reactions among brothers and sisters, and the way a primary caregiver is chosen by default, the one who lives closest, has no children or is the oldest. It recommends treating the role as a deliberate decision about who is most able and willing, holding a family meeting with a facilitator if the discussion is likely to be contentious, and putting the money on the table: durable powers of attorney and advance health care directives decide who is in charge if the parent becomes incapacitated, a personal care agreement can compensate the sibling who cuts back on work, and the parent’s will is the parent’s to direct, whatever anyone did or did not do.⁶ The conversation with the parent is harder than the one among siblings. AARP cites a 2025 survey in which three in five adults said they would be uncomfortable revealing their bank balance to family, and quotes an elder law author on why adult children hesitate, not wanting to seem grasping, to question a parent’s competence or to invade privacy. Its six questions run from whether an estate plan exists and when it was updated, through the bills and debts the parent manages, whether a stranger has asked for money, and where the account passwords are kept, to what worries the parent most and where the parent wants to live.⁸ The Star Tribune’s columnist turns the responsibility around: older adults who expect help from their children owe them the information about their finances, resources and wishes well in advance, and the time consuming research into local programs that their busy children cannot do.⁴

Honestly stated, the limit of the subject is that the surveys count households and the documentaries record hours, and neither measures the thing families say matters most. Pew can report that a third of caregivers believe their health has suffered; it cannot say how much a parent’s last years at home were worth to the daughter who gave up the sale of the house. The planning questions underneath, who holds the power of attorney, how a parent’s accounts are titled, what happens to a retirement account when the parent dies, the subject of inherited retirement accounts, and how much cash the caregiving household itself should keep in reserve, the subject of cash reserves in a financial plan, each depend on a person’s circumstances and are for qualified professionals to answer. What a family can do on its own is hold the meeting, which is described under family meetings and family governance.