Like the doctor in a corny joke, the study published last week by the Journals of Gerontology had good news and bad news.
The good news, say researchers from University College London (UCL) and Oxford University, is that people born in the 1940s and 1950s live longer than their parents. The bad news is that they are more likely to get sick.
The study analyzed data from the US, Britain and mainland Europe and found that people in their 60s and 70s face greater health problems, including obesity and diabetes, than the previous generation. But it would be wrong to assume that poor health is simply the price of a longer life.
According to the study’s lead author, Laura Gimeno, from UCL’s Center for Longitudinal Studies: “We find that there is a generational difference in health, with younger generations generally having poorer health than previous generations at the same age.”
This unfolding health crisis is impacting the government, the NHS and society as a whole, but perhaps the people most affected, apart from the sick themselves, are those dealing with sick parents and young children or teenagers – the ‘sandwich generation’.
It’s not a new demographic and its tensions are well captured in films like Little Miss Sunshinein which the trapped family was wedged into a VW camper.
The term was first popularized by American sociologists Dorothy Miller and Elaine Brody in 1981. Miller wrote of “adult children” who were exposed to “a unique set of non-shared stresses in which the provision of resources and services far outweighs the receiving it’.
Over the past forty years, however, these unshared tensions have steadily increased in the developed world as people live longer and face greater disabilities.
The declining health of older generations coincides with increased demands from parents, such as the spread of attention-heavy “soft parenting,” the rise in anxiety and depression among teens, and the delayed departure from the parental home of children in their 20s.
One poll estimated that six million Britons now consider themselves part of this sandwich generation. Increased longevity has also added a new name to the social menu: the four-generation ‘club sandwich’, in which those in their 40s-60s may have some economic or care responsibility for their children, grandchildren and parents, or those in their 20s-40s in a similar position to their children, parents and grandparents.
David Goodhart, head of demography, immigration and integration at the conservative think tank Policy Exchange, has just written a book called Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality. His thesis is that family obligations are disproportionately borne by women, but that greater equality has led to a shortage of care and an increasingly large and expensive role for the state.
He argues that the solution is not “to reduce equality, but to raise the status of healthcare, a traditionally female domain”.
For many women it is a world that remains stubbornly feminine. As one middle-aged female caregiver for elderly parents says: “Daughters are always expected to provide care unless there are no daughters. In that case, it will usually be the sons who receive a lot of support from their wives.”
Annalisa Barbieri, the GuardianThe family’s aunt says the picture emerging from her correspondents is of men who tend to “abuse themselves of responsibility, either by leaving or just not being emotional about it.”
Goodhart accepts that total equality is yet to come, although he points out that the share of domestic labor has shifted from 70:30 25 years ago to 60:40 today. But he claims that his argument is actually about reordering society’s priorities to free women and men to play a more active and useful role as caregivers.
“If we valued care work more at home and in the public economy, we would make it easier for one parent to stay at home, at least while the children are still in kindergarten – something that is very popular – but such valuable care work is often associated with women’s pasts, not their futures,” he says.
While critics who see talk of improved family stability as a conservative argument tantamount to a return to traditional roles, Goodhart believes that empowering women to balance motherhood and work less stressfully, and reducing child poverty that united families produce, must be promoted. “an idea that liberals support.”
Family therapist Jennifer Achan says that although there is a gender imbalance in society at large, most of the clients who come to her with multigenerational issues are men: “It’s usually because they are struggling with their marriage as a result of their marriage breaking up . time between their family and caring for a parent, or their mother moving in with the family and the woman not being happy.”
Laura, a 50-year-old woman with three teenagers, is one of three sisters who share responsibility for an ailing 91-year-old father who lives a 90-minute drive away (names of interviewees have been changed).
“It becomes a bit, ‘Why can’t you go there? I’ve done that the last two times,” she says of the resentment that can build around parental care. “But you have to get over that and realize that people are doing what they can.”
For Philippa, who is in her mid-fifties, getting over it has proven to be quite a challenge. She felt abandoned by her brother when their mother started showing signs of dementia. “He responded to her cognitive decline by moving to the other side of the country and leaving me to care for our mother,” she says, still saddened by the memory. “It was so hard, I can’t even describe it.”
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As Tolstoy’s famous statement about unhappy families suggested, intergenerational dynamics are complex and infinitely varied. But while every struggling family situation is unique, some are more unique than others, so to speak.
Take, for example, the case of Michael, a 60-year-old builder and writer living in Devon. He has a one-year-old daughter with his partner, who both live in Belgium, a 20-year-old son from a previous marriage who is studying at university and an 87-year-old father in Derbyshire.
“My father is very independent, but when my mother died five years ago his drinking, which had always been heavy, started to become a bigger problem,” he says.
While visiting his suspiciously uncommunicative father, Michael discovered bank statements all over the house showing strange online expenses. Further investigation revealed that the octogenarian had bought items for an online ‘girlfriend’ and had spent large sums of money on pornography, chatlines and women’s underwear.
“He was manipulated and had spent twenty thousand dollars in two months,” says Michael, who was forced to get a power of attorney to put an end to these unaffordable credit card attacks.
While he recognizes the inherent complications of having such a geographically and chronologically dispersed family, Michael says everything but one works well enough. The problem is that the fears this part evokes are not easy to control.
“My dad is the biggest concern because everything is a struggle with him,” Michael says. “We have approached it from all sides, tried love, understanding and anger – and now there is a sense of despair.”
Although Michael’s relationship with his Finnish partner in Belgium remains solid, Achan says many couples reach burnout and then break up due to the pressures of dealing with children going through the developmental stages while caring for their parents. to assure.
The whole care issue is one that, within the family context, involves feelings of guilt and shame, which are by nature private and often well-kept emotions. Rare are the parents who are not sorely tested by the task of raising children, but the vast majority are in it for the long haul.
The option of not caring for a parent, or simply resenting caregiving, is much more available, even if it takes an emotional toll. “My mother tells a lot of people that I abandoned her,” says Philippa, “even though I moved her to a nursing home near me and visit her every day. I really feel guilty. So there is no satisfaction, no feeling that you are making someone’s life better.”
For Emma, a 59-year-old divorced mother of four children, all still living at home, the guilt stems from her mother’s resistance to helping. Emma has asked her mother several times to move in with her, but the 90-year-old is adamant she doesn’t want to be a burden.
“When I drive by her house and see her sitting alone in a chair, I get angry,” she says.
Another part of this complicated issue is the prospect of assisted dying becoming legal in England and Wales. While the law would be limited to very specific cases of terminally ill people, opponents say, it could inadvertently encourage older people to see themselves as an unnecessary burden.
The only point on which all interested parties can perhaps agree is that all forms of care – for young and older people – have been neglected by us as a society, pushed to the margins or returned to private situations, where all the associated ongoing anxiety and frustration have disappeared. left to fester.
Whether or not you agree with Goodhart’s social perspective, it is difficult to argue that our attitudes and practices regarding healthcare are in need of a radical overhaul. We must rethink the needs and dignity of people at all stages of life, to humanize these most human situations. No one should be the meat in a demographic sandwich that is long past its expiration date.