“Sandwich generation” is the label for people who look after their children and their aging parents at the same time. It pictures one squeeze, as though help flowing up to a parent and help flowing down to a child were a single load.
A study of 191 middle-aged adults in the Philadelphia area suggests the two directions do not feel the same. Over up to seven evenings of phone interviews, they reported a slightly better mood on days they gave a grown child advice or a listening ear. On days they helped one of their own aging parents, with a ride, a suggestion or a sympathetic call, they reported more negative feelings. Karen Fingerman of the University of Texas at Austin led the work, which was published in 2015 in The Gerontologist and draws on the Family Exchanges Study.
The participants were about 56 on average. Each had at least one living parent, about 82 on average, and at least one child over 18; the grown children averaged 28. The interviews took place in 2013. The group had joined the larger family study five years earlier, and the researchers describe it as broadly representative of the Philadelphia metropolitan area.
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Every evening the questions were the same. Had they been in touch with any of their children or parents that day, in person, by phone or electronically? If so, had they given practical help, such as fixing something, running an errand or giving a ride? Advice, meaning information, suggestions or help with a decision? Emotional support, meaning listening to worries or being there when someone was upset? Then they rated a list of feelings, from happy, calm and determined to distressed, lonely and nervous, by how much of the day they had felt each one.
Help that flows downhill
Grown children were in the picture more often. The average participant was in touch with a grown child on about five days and with a parent on about three. Advice to grown children was the most common help in the whole study: 87 percent gave it at least once, and it came up on nearly half of all study days.
That advice, along with emotional support, was what went with the better days. Practical help to a grown child, the errands and repairs, was not linked to mood either way. Even the lift was modest, about seven hundredths of a point on a five-point scale.
The researchers suggest that advising a grown child may give parents a sense of still being useful to the next generation, what the psychologist Erik Erikson called generativity. Talking a problem through, they add, may also leave the relationship feeling closer by the end of the day. They see the results as fitting the “intergenerational stake,” the idea that middle-aged adults are more invested in their children than in their parents. On any given day, an individual grown child was more likely than an individual parent to receive each kind of help.
We have written before about how to offer advice to adult children without it sounding like criticism. That piece was about the words. This study looks at the person giving the advice, and how their day went. It cannot say how the advice landed, because it recorded only the parent’s side.
Rides, errands and worried calls
With their own parents, the picture changed. Every kind of help to a parent, whether emotional support, advice or practical help, went with more negative feelings that day. The good feelings were not measurably lower on those days. The bad ones were higher.
The parents were, on the whole, far frailer than the grown children. By the participants’ account, 57 percent of the parents had trouble with personal care, getting around or handling money, against 6 percent of the grown children with a developmental or physical disability.
The researchers float several reasons that helping a parent might feel heavier. It may bring up thoughts of that parent’s mortality. The help itself may be tiring. And older parents who receive more help than they give can show more depressive symptoms, which may weigh on the person helping. The authors call supporting parents “draining,” though they did not test which explanation, if any, is right.
The study also did not record how much any help involved, only whether it happened. Picking something up at the store for a mother counted the same as spending a whole day helping a child move, a gap the authors point out themselves. “Helping a parent” could mean a two-minute call or an afternoon in a hospital waiting room.
Nor can it say what caused what. The analysis followed the same people through their week and adjusted for health, age and other background traits, but the findings remain associations. A hard day with a parent may prompt both the help and the low mood, rather than the help causing the mood.
What carries into the next day
A second analysis of the same families, published in 2017 in the Journal of Family Psychology, looked at what lingered into the following day, and the answer depended on the generation. Kira Birditt of the University of Michigan and colleagues studied 156 of the participants. People had more tense or worrying moments with their parents than with their children. But it was irritations with a grown child, including ones people chose to let slide, that went with more negative feelings the next day. With parents, what carried over was worry: on the day after people fretted about a parent, or turned over a problem in the relationship, they reported more negative feelings.
The body told a different story about grown children. The team also measured the stress hormone cortisol in saliva. Tense exchanges with a grown child went with a steeper drop in cortisol across the day, which the researchers read as possibly less stress. Contact with a parent, even pleasant contact, went with a flatter drop the next day, a possible sign of stress that the authors think may reflect worry about an aging parent’s health and future. Their reading is that middle-aged adults may be soothed by their grown children even when things are tense, and find time with their parents more stressful even when it goes well.
Both studies drew on the same Philadelphia-area families in 2013. In the first, the parents averaged about 82 and were often frail. Its 191 participants also had slightly more schooling than the rest of the wider study, and rated their grown children a little lower on making them feel loved and understood, though they were similar in age, income, health and race. A family whose parent is seventy and well, or lives an ocean away, may have a very different experience. What we offer here is a writers’ reading of two papers; it cannot diagnose any one family. When low mood around a parent’s decline stops lifting, a doctor, a counselor or a caregiver support service is the right place to take it.
A week of evening calls could show which way the help was flowing on a given day, and how each day felt by its end. It could not show what a parent takes away once the calls stop: the easy conversation with a son, or the worry about a mother that lingers. Which one stays?