Half Of Americans In Their 40s Are Now ‘Sandwiched’, And It Is Not The Hardship Everyone Assumes

A school pickup on a Tuesday, a call about an elderly parent’s prescription change on a Wednesday. For a majority of Americans in their 40s, family responsibility now runs in both directions at once, and Pew Research has just measured how many of them are living it.

Researchers call them the sandwich generation, the sort of name that suggests it was coined by someone who needed to finish before lunch. The term dates to 1975 and has since acquired a club sandwich variant for people in their 50s and 60s with parents, adult children and grandchildren all in play.

The arithmetic behind it is stark. The typical first-time homebuyer is now a decade older than in the 1980s, a year in a private nursing home costs more than most households earn, and the share of adults living with their parents runs from almost nobody in one Midwestern city to a third of adults in two California metros.

The short answer to why grown children move back in is money. The longer answer, from a survey that asked the parents instead, is that for a sizeable share of them it was never about money at all. And the sandwiched, it turns out, report being slightly happier with family life than everyone else.