Sandwich generation: I take care of my children, I take care of my parents, I work outside the home...

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«I have been trying to be in several places at the same time for six months: at work, at my mother's chemo sessions, at the foot of my children's bed when they have angina... If before I already did the sports center route, school of dance and English academy, now, in addition, I have the problem of my mother's illness: she was the one who took care of my father, who since he had a stroke has half his body paralyzed... ».

Carmen, 50, laments and around her does the chorus of friends, neighbors and colleagues.

“My mother broke her pelvis just as the twins were starting the white week,” says Yolanda, 48, and Chus tells her story: “My 92-year-old mother-in-law comes home every three months, she can barely move.

And I have a 16-year-old son with a disability, and a job, and a mother in a residence...».

They all match:

Trapped between the nit comb and the sonotone, between the skateboard and the walker.

They belong to the sandwich generation, a concept devised in 1981 by social worker

to define that group of American women between the ages of 30 and 40 who felt as if they were between two slices of bread, one made up of their children. and another by his parents, who demanded his attention.

It is not, therefore, a new phenomenon, I tell myself.

In fact, I look back and remember my grandparents, he with multiple pathologies and she with Alzheimer's, rotating every month from one child's house to another... and in all of them there were children.

Spain in the past and today

In those years, I think, nobody here would have understood that sandwich, and even less in rural Spain.

After all, says Begoña Elizalde-San Miguel, professor of Sociology and Social Work at the Public University of Navarra, "our welfare model has traditionally been

caring for people, both older and younger, was guaranteed within of families, without the State having to allocate specific resources for this care”.

But today the metaphor of the sandwich is understood, and the care trap too.

Sandwich generation: mothers with children who also have to take care of their parents.Getty

The key is that in recent decades there has been a transformation of the Spanish family model.

The shed, even though it is the same, has other wickers: on the one hand, the woman -traditional caregiver, not necessarily by vocation- has joined the labor market with full rights;

on the other, there has been a clear increase in the age of childbearing: according to the INE, the average at which Spanish women begin to have children is around 32 years (the INE says so and it will be so, but I look around me and the that go with the baby carriage are closer to 40 than to 30...).

"It is an age that is constantly rising, a trend with no turning back," continues Elizalde-San Miguel, "and

To continue completing the picture, parents live long: we are the fourth country with the highest life expectancy (after Japan, Switzerland and Singapore, says the WHO) and this conquest also has its servitudes.

The perfect Storm

To this we can add other social changes that are not good or bad, but that do not help either.

«As a child, she came home from school, she took the sandwich and went to the street.

Today my children

Meli, 47, tells me, with three children between the ages of 12 and 6, and a 78-year-old mother with advanced glaucoma.

And she adds: "Until recently my mother helped me with them, today I am the one who has to keep an eye on her."

Because, within this familial model, when the grandparents are well we put the children down, and it is not just a matter of pure selfishness: let us think that the number of children between zero and three years old who have a place in a public nursery school is , at the state level, of a paltry 20%;

another 20% more can afford to leave them in private nurseries.

The rest?

Mothers who don't work outside the home... and

This can be so until pathologies appear in the elderly, the balance is cracked and we have to take care of them.

What can we do?

All these factors in the shaker help us understand why that sandwich generation is more exhausted today than yesterday.

"Everything has come together: my parents need me, but I still can't leave my children alone," explains Silvia Álava, Ph.D. in Psychology, from the Álava Reyes Psychology Center, "it's time for co-responsibility and

because it is not a burden that we should carry alone.

And so we open another melon.

That of our role as caregivers, a role that would seem burned into our sense of duty.

As I speak with Elizalde-San Miguel, I hear myself say how can I not take care of my mother, "if she is in my DNA...".

The hit on the head is immediate:

in which we continue to be socialized.

Care expectations are gendered, it is a collective belief that is very difficult to break.

I sing the mea culpa and talk about it with Silvia Álava, who says that she “has been instilled in us.

If we do not exercise the role of caregiver, guilt appears.

We have a higher level of self-demand, of a great daughter who takes care of her parents when there is a problem.

The importance of stewardship

In child care, even though 80% of women are the ones who request reductions in working hours for dependent children, we are seeing a

My example, with a husband permanently attentive to the children, was exceptional 20 years ago;

today it is less.

But the issue of the elderly seems to go more slowly.

Mamen, 51, sums it up like this: «I keep an eye on my mother, I go to see her, I talk to her every day... And he ignores his.

I have to keep reminding him to call her, but he stays so hot because he knows that her sister is there ».

Ah, true: as far as the elderly are concerned, the gender conflict does not occur only in the couple, but

Vanessa tells me this: «We are six children;

two girls and four boys.

But we are the ones who accompany them to the doctor, we look for someone to help them at home, we are attentive to the day to day, so that they do not lack for anything... ».

A matter of education?

«It often happens that fathers, when they get older and feel vulnerable, tend to

There is the issue of differences in education for boys and girls.

It is time to tackle it," says Silvia Álava, and Elizalde-San Miguel agrees with her, adding that there is a fundamental issue that worries demographers and sociologists and that we barely glimpse from our sandwich, which is the crisis of care, the dependency model, who cares for whom: «The Dependency Law has been largely translated into a benefit for family care;

we continue without professionalizing care.

Also, let's not fool ourselves: the symbolic value of good care is

we want someone who loves us to take care of us, not a stranger.

For Silvia Álava, “we are in a transition phase and there is a mismatch: the expectations of the elderly continue to link their care to the family and, within it, to women.

But they, increasingly, work outside the home.

It is the perfect excuse for the conflict”, says Silvia Álava.

The expectations

But the future looks even more difficult, I'm sorry to say.

Because it's not just that the age of childbearing continues to be delayed and that grandparents are going to live longer and longer... It's that we're also breaking records in the decline in birth rates.

So those fights between siblings about who cares for mom will cease to exist..., because

Before, for every person over 75 there were three people between 40 and 55 years of age.

Now, the population group that must take care of parents is smaller and will continue to decline.

There is no easy collective solution, especially when it comes to caring for the elderly.

"What will happen tomorrow?

Whoever can afford it will hire a caregiver, and the rest? Will our children want to take care of us?

Because it is possible that our daughters or granddaughters are capable of taking the slice of bread off their shoulders, of becoming more of a

if I may be frivolous, than a sandwich generation.

It is something that we must take into account, and the State too, concludes the expert, because "to think that the model will continue to work, leaving it to the chance that there is a relative willing to take care of us, puts us at risk of neglect."

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