Transitions in Caregiving Roles in Middle Adulthood

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Describe the opportunities and challenges of the sandwich generation period
• Describe the opportunities and challenges of launching children as young adults
• Describe the opportunities and challenges of becoming a grandparent

Terrell is celebrating his fiftieth birthday surrounded by all the people who matter most to him. His husband Mike and daughter Lina thoughtfully planned every detail down to making his favorite cake and gifting him the air fryer he’s been eyeing for months. But what will his birthday look like next year? Lina is heading off to college in the fall, and their son Will has his own baby on the way. Terrell’s family life is in a time of major transitions, and the next decade of life is sure to bring many more changes.

As you are learning, social development and family functioning in middle adulthood are complicated. Indeed, development generally does become more complicated and varied with age, no matter the domain. So far, you have considered the varied ways that adults might balance existing roles (such as caring for dependent children while working) and explore new roles (such as a change in marital status). In this section, you will examine how adults remain generative as their roles continue to evolve to include launching young adult children, caring for aging parents, and/or becoming grandparents. People at this age are sometimes referred to as “the sandwich generation” (Miller, 1981), a term that envisions the person in middle adulthood “sandwiched” between two slices of bread that represent the needs of the younger and older generations (Figure 14.20).

Figure 14.20 The sandwich generation describes middle-aged adults who are contributing to the care of their children and aging parents. (credit: “Three Generations” by Brian/Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

The Sandwich Generation

More than forty years ago, Dorothy Miller, a professor of social work, advocated for a greater focus on the experience and needs of midlife adults “who are sandwiched between their aging parents and their own maturing children” and therefore incurring a “unique set of unshared stresses in which giving of resources and service far outweighs receiving and exchanging them” (Miller, 1981). With a rising number of young adults remaining home with their parents, current economic pressures, and increased life expectancy for aging parents, the challenges facing the current sandwich generation are likely to only increase, with women disproportionately feeling the strain.

During middle adulthood, most U.S. adults are balancing work and family responsibilities as they achieve higher rank and earning power in the workplace, raise children, maintain a marriage, and care for aging parents. These multiple roles can provide rewarding opportunities for the growth of identity, intimacy, and generativity, an experience known as role enhancement (Thoits, 1986). However, the multiple roles can also create stressful demands on the time, attention, and energy of adults in midlife. Mothers between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four years report the highest levels of stress of any age group, and most cite their family relationships as the primary source of that stress (American Psychological Association, 2008). Compared to men, women are the more likely to provide unpaid care to members of their social network, including their partner’s family, in addition to their regular work responsibilities (Family Caregiver Alliance, 2015). When the increased responsibilities associated with occupying multiple roles result in a decline in subjective well-being, the resulting experience is known as role strain (Goode, 1960). Role strain can increase feelings of stress, hopelessness, and exhaustion, and decrease opportunities for personal or leisure time (Kelly et al., 2020),

Currently, 25 percent of U.S. adults are simultaneously providing unpaid care for both a dependent child and for an aging parent, with Asian, Hispanic, and Black families more likely than White families to provide care for aging relatives (AARP, 2001). The dual responsibility of caring for both children and aging relatives produces greater financial and emotional difficulties and feelings of role overload or strain than does taking care of only aging parents (Lei et al., 2023). This caregiving overload can result in reduced personal time, reduced social activities, disrupted household routines, lower marital satisfaction, reduction in paid work hours, and deteriorating mental and physical health (Naldini et al., 2016; Noelker & Wallace, 1985; Rose-Rego et al., 1998). These combined potential negative psychological, social, and financial impacts of providing unpaid care for family members are called the caregiver burden. Negative impacts are lessened for caregivers who feel better equipped to provide such care and who hold the perception that they have more social support available from others (Parks & Pilisuk, 1991).

Researchers investigating the caregiver burden advise that increased availability of resources external to the family is the most effective way to offset the psychological, social, and financial burden faced by caregivers (Parks & Novielli, 2000; Parks & Pilisuk, 1991; Swartz & Collins, 2019). These resources might include support and advocacy groups such as the National Alliance for Caregiving, affordable options for home health-care professionals, and an expansion of benefits available from the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). The FMLA protects an adult’s job security while they take time away from work to care for a family member. On the thirtieth anniversary of the act’s passage, President Joe Biden advocated for expanding benefits to include paid time off, saying “The United States is one of the only countries in the world that does not provide paid leave to its workers, undermining the health and economic security of families and our Nation. As millions more Americans join today’s so-called ‘sandwich generation,’ struggling to care for both young kids and aging parents, we need to help” (Biden, 2023). In the meantime, members of these adults’ community, family, friends, and workplace must recognize the incredible value of family caregivers and provide as much practical, tangible, and emotional support as possible to maximize generativity and minimize role strain.

Link to Learning

The National Alliance for Caregiving seeks to “support and empower family caregivers to thrive at home, work, and life” through research, policy analysis, and advocacy. To increase the visibility of caregivers in the United States, they collect and share stories of the lived experiences of real people. Read some of these stories or share your own on their website.

Launching and Empty Nesters

When writing about the challenge of raising children as they approach young adulthood, parenting advice authors Dennis Trittin and Arlyn Lawrence quoted writer Frank A. Clark: “The most important thing that parents can teach their children is how to get along without them.” To achieve this goal, Trittin and Lawrence (2013) recommend incremental releases in control, to move the parenting role from “Director” to “Chief Encourager.” This process is often referred to as launching, a process during which children transition from being dependent on their parents to being independent young adults.

The launching experience is influenced by many economic and cultural factors (Mitchell & Wister, 2015). Several recent societal changes, including rising student loan debt and housing costs, have increased the number of young adult children who have delayed leaving their parents’ home or returned home after an initial departure. A young adult child who returns to live with their parents after a period of living independently is referred to as a boomerang child (VanOrman & Jacobsen, 2020). The percentage of young adults living with their parents also temporarily spiked during lockdown restrictions imposed early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Cultural context may also influence children’s departure from home. Families of collectivistic cultural heritages (such as are found in countries such as China, India, or Southern Europe [e.g., Italy, Greece, or Spain]) are more likely to expect children to remain in the parents’ home until marriage or later.

Link to Learning

While there may be positive reasons for an adult to return home to live with their parents, that arrangement can sometimes be associated with negative outcomes for parents, such as decreased quality of life (Tosi & Grundy, 2019) and postponed parental retirement (Seiter et al., 2023), and decreased well-being for the adult children involved (Newport, 2014). Professional life coach Sherri Gorden shares her tips for how parents can best navigate this transition to promote the success and well-being of the whole family.

Most adults ages forty-five to sixty-four years are living in a household without children (VanOrman & Jacobsen, 2020), primarily because their children are now grown and living independently, a phase of parenthood known as the empty nest. Empty-nest parents continue to serve as an important source of wisdom to help guide younger parents, given that they can reflect on their parenting challenges and successes with greater clarity and without the daily stresses of parenting. When asked to provide advice for younger parents, empty nesters recommend building relationships with children as the foundation of rewarding parenting and positive child outcomes. Specifically, they emphasize the importance of unconditional love, involvement, and communication as effective strategies for parents to encourage exploration and responsibility as children prepare to leave the nest (Chapman & Schramm, 2018).

The empty-nest phase of life is typically associated with both challenges and benefits. Many adults report “feeling old” now that their kids are out of the house and feeling uncertain about their roles and identities once they are no longer primary caregivers. They also report being concerned about being bored or lonely in the absence of their children. However, married parents report an increase in their marital satisfaction (Bouchard, 2014; Carstensen et al., 1996; Gorchoff et al., 2008), time spent together, communication with each other, privacy (Nagy & Theiss, 2013), and closeness (Tracy et al., 2022). Empty nesters may also have more opportunity to reengage in leisure activities, which have been found to promote subjective well-being among individuals in middle and late adulthood (Heo et al., 2018) (Figure 14.21). For example, increases in leisure time afforded by an empty nest can inspire new and growing hobbies and sports, such as a pickleball or gardening (Heo et al., 2018; Scott et al., 2015). Psychologists advise adults to approach the empty-nest transition with optimism about the new beginnings it can afford midlife adults but to be prepared that sometimes the newfound freedom can be accompanied by a sense of guilt, uncertainty, or even loss.

Figure 14.21 Empty nesters have more opportunity to reengage with each other and their hobbies, such as (a) traveling together, (b) working in one’s own garden or a community plot, and (c) trying out new ways to remain active, such as pickleball. (credit a: modification of work “Couple enjoying sunset at Yosemite Half Dome” by Kārlis Dambrāns/Flickr, CC BY 2.0; credit b: modification of work “Tom the Gardener” by Tony Fischer/Flickr, CC BY 2.0; credit c: modification of work “Club Wars – March 2021” by Stephen Rahn/Flickr, Public Domain)

Grandparenthood

In addition to their roles as parents of launching children and children of aging adults, 25 percent of midlife U.S. adults are also grandparents. This number has declined somewhat in the last decade (it was 33 percent in 2014). The average length of grandparenthood for today’s adults is thirty years, which means the average U.S. adult will spend half their adulthood as a grandparent (Daw et al., 2016). Hispanic and Black Americans are more likely than White Americans to become grandparents in middle adulthood (Westrick-Payne, 2023).

Grandparents often provide important benefits to the functioning of the family system. Most live within an hour of their grandchildren and consider their contribution to the care of those children to be a necessity (National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, 2008). Research indicates that children can benefit from grandparents’ involvement. Adolescents with emotionally involved and financially supportive grandparents exhibit greater kindness, generosity, and academic engagement over time (Yorgason et al., 2011).

Most adults expect and describe the experience of grandparenting to be satisfying and generative (Thiele & Whalen, 2006). Indeed, for some adults, a pronounced longing to become grandparents was related to lower levels of life satisfaction (Dorry et al., 2023). For grandmothers, taking a high level of responsibility for the care of their grandchild is positively associated with satisfaction (Thomas, 1986) (Figure 14.22). However, unlike other unpaid volunteer work, that involvement is not associated with improvements in the grandparents’ cognitive health (Henning et al., 2023).

Figure 14.22 For grandmothers, involvement with the care of their grandchild is positively associated with life satisfaction. (credit: “Children and Nature” by Children Nature Network/nappy, CC0 1.0)

Grandparents are the primary caregivers for approximately one in ten American children (Carlson, 2021). Custodial grandparents exhibit poorer physical and emotional well-being than noncustodial grandparents (Harnett et al., 2014) and report feelings of isolation from their same-aged peers, as well as shame and guilt regarding the circumstances that led to their need to assume the role of primary caregiver for their grandchildren (Hayslip et al., 2015). However, research finds that contextual factors (such as the availability of support) as well as personal strengths (such as resilience, empowerment, and resourcefulness) can protect against the possible negative outcomes of adults in skipped generation households (Hayslip et al., 2019).