Who can look after my 95-year-old mum? How do I support my troubled teen? Experts’ top tips for the sandwich generation crushed by conflicting demands
When I was born, my grandmother was only 58. Her own parents were both dead, her mother having died in her 70s a few years earlier. I am 58 myself now, but my future grandchildren are still probably some years away. Two of my children are still living at home, with all the needs that entails, while my mother, a sprightly 83-year-old, can have every expectation of living into her next decade. But she will need me more as she ages, and my daughters are, I hope, going to want me to help with their offspring when the time comes. All this means life is likely to get a whole lot busier and more stressful as I get older.
Many of my friends are there already – last year, a Bank of Scotland survey found grandparents saved their children almost £4,000 per family – and I sense the frayed edges of lives being pulled in too many directions. How can we survive this squeeze? How do we stop ourselves being spread so thin that there’s nothing left of us, or for us, at a time when we hoped things would be getting easier, not tougher? I put your questions to the experts.
