One woman cared for everyone and died: What is a "sandwich generation"
You probably know this family: a middle-aged couple, their matured children - who have already completed their studies, but have not yet moved out - and older parents who already need help in everyday life. If you analyze how in such a situation responsibilities for caring for loved ones are distributed, it often turns out that those who are in the middle bear the whole burden: they are simultaneously engaged in both children dependent on them and their own parents. Sociologists call them the “sandwich generation” - they, like a sandwich, are “pressed” by responsibilities from two sides.
One for all
One of the first term used by social worker Dorothy Miller in the scientific article "The generation of" sandwich ": adult children of aging people." She attributed to this group of men and women forty-five - sixty-five years old, who are faced with tremendous stress: in the family they care more about others than receive care. According to Miller, his own experiences of sandwiches are superimposed on this pressure. Contrary to the hope that at last there will be time for themselves, things only pile in: the grown children are not as independent as we would like, and the parents can no longer cope with some difficulties. At the same time, Miller notes that they have a lot of power: they are called the "command generation", because often they are responsible for making big decisions.
Since the eighties, the situation has changed slightly. According to the Pew Research Center, who in 2013 investigated the “sandwich generation”, almost half (47%) of women and men of forty-fifty years old are raising a child or financially helping adult children; their own parents are sixty-five years old and more. According to the same data, one out of seven (15%) middle-aged adults financially helps both parents and children. At the same time, what exactly the “sandwich generation” faces is still changing with time. “We used to call the“ sandwich generation ”of people who cared for both sick parents and young children at the same time,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University. “The current adult generation is increasingly helping young adults who cannot provide for themselves. At the same time time they have elderly parents who also need support. "
From UK to Russia
In many ways, the difficulties of "sandwiches" are due to economic and social reasons - for example, the high cost of university education, because of which graduates can stay with impressive loans and are forced to live with their parents until they can afford separate housing. Expensive housing forces adult family members to share space - or move back if someone faces financial difficulties. There is also a situation where parents help matured children to take care of their grandchildren, as they cannot afford a nanny or kindergarten. According to surveys of charitable organizations, about two million grandparents in the UK reduce working hours, temporarily leave the position or leave to work in principle to care for their grandchildren - and still help their children financially.
In Russia, different generations of the same family still often live together - which means that among them there is the “sandwich generation”. For example, according to the HSE study, the age of separation from the parental family has moved from 18–20 years to 23–25 years: young people spend more time studying, choosing a partner and searching for themselves than their parents. According to the Public Opinion Foundation, about 80% of children of eighteen to twenty years live with their parents; at the age of twenty-one to twenty-three years, this figure is decreasing, but remains high - 62%.
In 2015, the Moscow City Duma Commission on Social Policy and Labor Relations proposed legally securing the children the obligation to financially support elderly parents - in addition to the existing article of the Family Code, which obliges able-bodied adult children to take care of disabled parents in need (the latter can recover from children alimony through the court). "We have more and more socially abandoned, vulnerable both children and parents. We see that lonely living elderly unhealthy people are struggling with this on their own and with social support of the city. At the same time, these people have children, in many cases they don’t the poor, but they removed parents from their expenses. We need to think about how to legally enshrine the same responsibility of children for the financial situation of their parents, "said Commission Chairman Mikhail Antontsev.
Club Sandwich Generation
Recently they say that in addition to the “sandwich generation” a “sandwich club generation” also appears. There are more “ingredients” in it: men and women help not only their parents and grown-up children, but also take care of their grandchildren — that is, they are engaged in three generations (or four at once, if, for example, they need help from their own partner). "We are the“ generation of the club sandwich ": fifty, sixty and seventy years old, sandwiched between our aging parents, adult children and little grandchildren. Many of us have spouses or have brothers and sisters in serious condition who also need care." , - tell professors of psychiatry and psychology Jane Gidden and Ellen Cole, the authors of a blog about seventy-year-olds. “The second generation of the family faces pressure,” said Dr. Bill Biseaway, a researcher at Open University. “Often these are the only family members who have the time and resources to cope with surprises and crises. In such situations, it can be very difficult ".
The data of the British company ICM, which is engaged in surveys, show that now the family of every fifth Briton consists of four generations - and by the year 2030 every fourth family will live in such families. But despite the fact that such a situation will occur more and more often, adults who are faced with this are often not ready for such a load. According to the same ICM survey, almost half of the respondents do not understand how much money they have to educate children and to pay for the care of elderly family members, and every tenth said that he does not have savings to pay for the needs of relatives.
Of course woman
Although technically in the "sandwich generation" anyone can be, in practice, this is a gender-colored problem: care for elderly relatives and children still falls more often on women. European University professor Elena Zdravomyslova notes that when the question arises of who should take care of children and sick relatives, families often choose not to limit the career of a man - therefore, these responsibilities are more often placed on women: "Her inhibition at the workplace is considered not so destructive for her personally, not for everyone. A woman more easily agrees to this burden. "
A person who finds himself in a “sandwich” position may encounter various difficulties - from changing his lifestyle (for example, if he has to temporarily quit his job or move to live with relatives) and changes in financial condition to burnout and conflicts due to changes dynamics of family relationships. For women, this situation can become even more difficult. “A woman is trapped, as it were, especially if there is no man in the house,” notes Olga Isupova, a senior researcher at the HSE Institute of Demography. “She either has to work partially, or quit her job, as a result of which money becomes less and less, the family begins living on some kind of allowance or savings, the opportunity to take a nurse disappears. And if nobody helps at the state-society level, the situation is quite complicated. At the same time, if a person takes care of his parents or relatives, everyone perceives it as Orm. They say, well, so it should be. "
“Although some women are happy that they have the opportunity to take care of their relatives, others said that they were in trouble, and some were desperate. The most difficult and most common situations were those when a relationship with a husband turned from a partner into a relationship the patient and the nurse, ”say Jane Gidden and Ellen Cole.
Collective responsibility
Does the "sandwich generation" problem have a solution? Some, like Jane Gidden and Ellen Cole, see him as striving to "not be a burden to their own children": "Knowing how much effort it takes to take care of us at our age, we, seventy-year-olds, buy long-term health insurance, we choose smaller homes so that our children do not have to deal with our fractures, study home care, look at nursing homes and social housing for older people, choosing what will more suit our needs and tastes when the time comes. "
Others believe that it is necessary to change attitudes towards caring for older people: in Russia, the view is still dominant that their children should take care of the elderly, while in Western countries this is no longer the case - which, of course, does not negate the need for care and attention to older relatives. As a result, the system of care for older people is also changing: old people's homes in the United States and in Russia are now at a very different level. Changing the attitude to the decree can also help reduce the burden on women - if it is no longer considered as an exclusively female responsibility.
In any case, whatever the solution to the problem, we should start by paying attention to it - and admit that in the near future the “sandwich generation” will only grow.
Photo: dizelen - stock.adobe.com, Gresei - stock.adobe.com
