Sandwich generation feels the bite

With increasing incentives to get women back into the workforce, parents are under pressure to care for both old and young, writes Louise Holden

For more than a decade in the US, the phrase Sandwich Generation has been in common use. It refers to the group of people who have had children in their 30s and 40s, and who now find themselves "sandwiched" between caring for young children or teenagers and ageing parents with increasing needs.

Last month, the Tánaiste, Mary Harney, raised the issue of care for the elderly at a Progressive Democrats seminar on the challenges of an ageing population. She suggested families should bear greater responsibility for the care of older relatives. "Is it fair that people require the State to pick up the bill, and then they get the benefits when people die?" Harney asked.

The Tánaiste is to be commended for raising this issue - it's a universal experience and yet it is rarely discussed publicly. However, it is simplistic to suggest that families are dumping their older relatives on the State while they wait for the inheritance to roll in.

Care of the elderly has traditionally been the responsibility of daughters. Men worked, women minded children and, when the time came, grandparents. However, over the past 10 years there has been a concerted effort in this country to get women out of the home and into the workforce. Everything, from public policy statements to tax individualisation to family-friendly work practices, is geared towards getting more women into the labour force.

This is positive in many ways, but there are sacrifices to be made if every adult between the age of 18 and 65 is ushered into the office. Society's unpaid jobs such as voluntary work and elderly care slip down the list of priorities when paid work and parenting eat up every available minute.

Add to this another modern trend - later childbearing - and the pressure intensifies. As more women study and work for longer before starting a family, more parents find themselves becoming part of the sandwich generation. Their children are barely out of nappies before their own parents' needs start to increase. Parents in their 40s and 50s, sometimes at the peak of their own careers, suddenly find themselves caring for two generations.

Writing in a new collection of essays entitled The Bitch in the House (edited by Cathy Hanauer, published by Penguin), author Helen Schulman describes her initiation into the sandwich generation.

"If we'd had children at the normal age, say 25 or 28, our parents could have helped us when the kids were little and only staggered their way downhill towards helplessness after the children were grown. I was 35, my husband 38, when our first child was born. Now I was a victim of my own arrogance and biology, taking care of both my families, the first one and this one at the same time. I didn't know where to be, who to go to, who needed me more."

Because families in the US have been squaring up to this issue for over decade, there are many more sources of help and support available (some relevant websites are listed below). If the Government is serious about shifting the "burden of care" back to families here, then it will have to look at meaningful ways of assisting parents, and especially mothers, sandwiched between this generation and the next.

Herbert G. Lingren, Extension Family Life Specialist, offers solutions for common pressures of minding the old and the young http://ianrpubs.unl.edu/family/g1117.htm#sandwich Carol Abaya, columnist for the Globe newspaper, has been writing on the subject of the sandwich generation for a number of years. For an archive of her articles visit: http://www.globesyndicate.com/sand.html

Parent Trends: What's new in the world of parenting

Scientists at the University of Florida have discovered that human fetuses hear vowels rather than consonants and are more sensitive to the melodic parts of speech than to pitch. The results were surprising, with the intelligibility of sentences "actually much higher than we anticipated," the researcher revealed.

Pooling resources

First-time mothers are less likely to need pain relief during labour if they use a birthing pool, according to researchers. Using the pool during the first stage of labour reduces the need for epidural injections, according to the Southampton University team. The research results, published by the British Medical Journal, could mean women could benefit from some elements of water birth without having to deliver the baby underwater.

Sleep on it

Students who stay up late trying to crack homework problems would be better off asleep, say German researchers. Tests on 106 volunteers back up anecdotal evidence that a good night's sleep can help solve problems. The volunteers were shown a "hidden code" puzzle - those kept awake overnight reportedly had far less chance of solving it, the journal Nature reports. Scientists believe that because the brain appears to restructure information from the previous day during sleep hours, a period of sleep may produce insight into problems.