Willow Reed

The WordsOther Thresholds

Other Thresholds 11 min read

What is the sandwich generation? (And why it hits mothers hardest)

A long deal table in low afternoon light laid at both ends, a child's small enamel cup at one end and an older person's teacup and saucer at the other

The sandwich generation is caring for an aging parent and your own children at once. Here is who counts, and what the name leaves out about the person in the middle.

The sandwich generation is the people caring for an aging parent and for their own children at the same time. That is the whole of it. You are in it the day both of those are true and out of it the day one of them stops, which is why it is not a generation in the way the boomers or the millennials are a generation. Nobody is born into it.

That is the answer to the question. The rest of this is about the name, because the name is doing something to you that I do not think anybody has pointed out.

Where I am standing first. I write about matrescence, the identity change of becoming a mother, and about what it does to your sense of who you are. This piece sits in Other Thresholds, where the passages built the same way but not made of matrescence go. I have written separately about recognizing yourself in the phrase. This one is about what the phrase means.

Who counts, and who does not

The most recent count uses two conditions at once. You have a living parent aged 65 or older, and you either have a child under 18 or you gave money to an adult child in the past year.

On that measure, 25 percent of American adults are in it. By age:

Age Share who are sandwiched
18 to 29 8 percent
30s 25 percent
40s 54 percent
50s 45 percent
60 and over 10 percent

Pew Research Center, August 2026, from a survey of 8,750 US adults.

So more than half of everyone in their forties. That is the figure that gets quoted, and it is where the phrase "middle-aged" in every other definition comes from.

The age band is a description, not a threshold

Look at the thirties row again. One in four.

Every page you read on this describes the sandwich generation as middle-aged. That is true as an average and it is not a rule, and the difference matters if you are thirty-three with a two-year-old and a father who has just been given a diagnosis. You read "middle-aged", decide the word is not about you, and go on having no name for it.

Part of why the two now arrive together is that motherhood starts later than it used to. First births to mothers aged 35 and over rose from 10.0 percent of all first births in 2016 to 12.5 percent in 2023 (National Center for Health Statistics, 2025). The later your first baby, the likelier it is that your parents start needing you while your children still do. For a growing number of women these are not two chapters. They are one.

The age band gets written down as though it were the entry requirement. It is not one.

Two names were put forward in 1981, and the one with no person in it won

Here is the part I actually wanted to write.

In September 1981 the social worker Dorothy A. Miller published an article called "The 'sandwich' generation: adult children of the aging" in the journal Social Work. A month later the gerontologist Elaine Brody published "'Women in the Middle' and Family Help to Older People" in The Gerontologist.

Same people. Two names, one month apart, in two different professional literatures.

I am not going to tell you Miller coined it. She put the word in quotation marks in her own title, and that is usually how a writer signals a phrase already in circulation rather than one she is minting. What I can tell you is that 1981 is where it enters the professional record.

Now look at what each name points at.

"Women in the middle" names a person and then says where she is standing. "The sandwich generation" names the pressure and leaves the middle empty. There is no filling in the phrase. There is bread, and there is more bread, and the thing between them is defined entirely by being pressed from both sides.

The one that survived is the one with no person in it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses it in its own news releases now, and it is sitting in the summary at the top of whatever search brought you here. Brody's name for the same women is in a journal archive.

If you have read anything else on this site, you have met that shape before. The thing I keep writing about in matrescence is not the tiredness. It is the morning you notice that every day now has a protagonist and it is not you, that you have quietly become the setting, the weather, the supply chain.

A phrase that describes you as the gap between two sets of needs is not a new insult. It is the second time you have been described that way, and this time it is the term the government uses.

Why it falls harder on mothers when it falls on both equally

The honest version of this is more interesting than the version you will find elsewhere.

Men and women are equally likely to be in the sandwich generation. That is Pew's own finding, and I have not found anything published since that overturns it (Pew Research Center, 2013). If a page tells you that most sandwiched people are women, it is wrong.

The membership is even. What the membership costs is not.

Among people providing unpaid eldercare who also have a child under 18 at home, 84 percent of the fathers are employed full time and 60 percent of the mothers are (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). Same position, same two dependents, and one of them is far less likely to still have a whole job at the end of it.

Among family caregivers, women report moderate or high emotional strain more often than men, 41 percent against 33 (AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 2025). Among adults regularly helping an aging parent, 47 percent of women say it has damaged their emotional well-being, against 30 percent of men (Pew Research Center, 2026).

Notice what kind of thing each of those measures. Membership is a position, and positions turn out to be handed round fairly evenly. Everything else on that list is what the position does to a person, and none of it is even at all.

Which is to say the definition is measuring the one thing that is equal.

What it does to a self that has already been rearranged once

This next part is mine rather than anybody's data, and I would rather say so than let a measured tone imply otherwise.

The second reorganization does not arrive at an intact self.

If this has landed on you in your thirties, what it is landing on is a woman who has already spent some years being reassembled around somebody else's needs and had only partly got herself back. The first time there was a baby, and everybody could see why. This time there is a parent, and you are expected to absorb it as logistics.

The one piece of research I found that looks at this from the inside rather than counting hours is a 2016 study of eighteen women combining motherhood, care for a parent, and paid work. What the authors describe is not a scheduling problem. It is these women working continuously to hold on to a coherent sense of who they are across three roles that each want all of her (Evans and colleagues, 2016). That is role strain in the literature's language. In mine it is the same sentence I have been writing about matrescence for two years.

There is one pair of findings in the caregiving data I keep coming back to, because it is exactly the shape of the other thing. Around a quarter of caregivers say they feel alone. About half say the caring gives them a sense of purpose or meaning (AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 2025). Those are the same people, in the same week, with no way to say both out loud at once without somebody's face changing.

I have written that paragraph before about a baby. You did not lose yourself is the line I keep returning to, and it holds here, and it is not comfort. It is a description.

Where this stops being mine to talk about

Caring for two generations at once is a real load, and there is a clinical literature about what it does to people. That literature is not mine and I am not going to borrow its authority.

If nothing shifts at all, if you cannot function, if you have stopped being able to feel anything in either direction, or if your own thoughts frighten you, that belongs with a doctor or a psychologist this week rather than after it. Being described accurately is not the same as being assessed, which I have written about at more length elsewhere. This piece is only the first of those.

What I still do not know

Whether a better name would help, or whether it is too late for one. Brody's phrase lost in 1981 and forty-five years of institutional use have gone into the other one since.

And whether the first passage makes the second easier or harder. I have heard it argued both ways by women who have done both, and I notice that the ones who say easier tend to be further out, which could mean it gets easier or could mean the account softens with distance. I cannot tell from here.

What to carry

You are in it if both things are true, whatever your age, and the age band in every other definition is an average rather than a door you have to be tall enough to walk through.

And the reason the word feels like it does not have room for you in it is that it does not. It never named you. It named the two things on either side of you and let you be the space between them. That is worth knowing, because the feeling that there is nothing of you left in the middle is a fair reading of the sentence you were handed, not a fact about you.

Sources

Keep reading in Other Thresholds.

Willow Reed writes about matrescence and maternal identity. About Willow. Willow Reed is a pen name. The experience is not.

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Other Thresholds

  1. 8 min

    Sandwich generation meaning, and why it lands differently the second decade

    The sandwich generation means one adult caring for a child and an aging parent at the same time. What the definition does not contain is a length.

  2. 9 min

    Caregiver identity and the invisible labor nobody counts

    The labor has a name. It has had several since 1987, published in real journals by women who saw it clearly. Naming it did not get it counted.