How the sandwich generation is reshaping conversations on Capitol Hill

By Michael Jones

There’s something uniquely exhausting about being responsible for both your parents’ decline and your children’s future at the same time.

It’s a paradox that was on display this week when the Senate Aging Committee convened a hearing on the sandwich generation—the growing group of middle-aged adults balancing the demands of raising children while caring for aging parents. Lawmakers examined how families are navigating supporting loved ones with medical services and supervisions, coordinating medications and prescriptions and aiding their financial, legal and emotional difficulties, and explored targeted policy solutions to remove obstacles and ease those burdens.

Members of Congress themselves increasingly fall into this generation, especially Gen X lawmakers now balancing older parents and younger families while legislating on care policy.

Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.), who serves on the Aging Committee, said her own life mirrors the pressures facing millions of Americans in the sandwich generation. She described the financial and emotional strain of supporting a daughter in college while helping care for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, following the recent death of her father.

Alsobrooks said the experience has sharpened her focus on the interconnected costs weighing on families, from long-term care and prescription drugs to housing, groceries and basic health care access. She noted that her parents worked hard and played by the rules but still were not wealthy and acknowledged that many families are struggling to stretch limited resources as caregiving and living expenses continue to rise.

“I’m really grateful that I’m here and I can say to my constituents, not that I imagine how this must make them feel, it is literally that I am living it,” she told me this week. “It’s important that we have people in the Senate who live like the people they represent. I think it makes all the difference in how we make decisions.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) said he sees the pressures of the sandwich generation’s both at home and through his pastoral work, describing the balancing act of raising young children while helping care for his 88-year-old mother as she navigates the challenges that come with aging and declining health.

Warnock said those overlapping responsibilities have given him firsthand insight into the affordability pressures many families face as they juggle caregiving, work and daily expenses all at once—experiences he said regularly surface in conversations with constituents struggling to make it all work.

“I think it gives me a perspective, common touch and understanding of the struggles of everyday people,” he said. “And I try to bring that insight to the committee.”

An estimated 11 million Americans care for both aging parents and their own children, according to data provided by the committee. Unpaid family caregivers provide about $600 billion worth of care each year, doing work that the health care system can’t handle alone.

The squeeze facing the sandwich generation was, in many ways, mathematically inevitable.

Americans are living longer, meaning more adults are spending years caring for aging parents with chronic illnesses, dementia or mobility challenges. At the same time, child care costs have soared while housing, health care and grocery prices continue rising faster than many families’ incomes.

The result is that millions of middle-aged Americans are now simultaneously supporting children, helping aging parents and trying to prepare for their own financial futures, often while working full-time jobs themselves.

Americans are also having children later in life, increasing the likelihood that adults raising school-age or college-age children will also have parents in their 70s, 80s or even 90s who need growing levels of support.

Yet Washington still largely treats child care and elder care as separate policy conversations.

Child care debates are often centered around workforce participation, tax credits, preschool and paid leave. Elder care discussions tend to revolve around Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and nursing homes.

But for many families, those costs are intertwined inside the same monthly household budget.

One adult may be paying for daycare while also helping cover prescriptions, assisted living costs or in-home care for a parent with Alzheimer’s. The financial strain, emotional burden and time demands overlap.

The result is a disconnect that has left many caregivers feeling invisible in a political system that often discusses care in isolated silos while families experience it as one interconnected affordability crisis.

Aging Committee Chair Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Ranking Member Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have proposed a suite of legislative solutions to help family caregivers across the country and provide them with financial security.

Scott has backed bipartisan efforts aimed at easing both the financial and emotional burdens facing older Americans and their families, including proposals to combat senior loneliness, expand support for family caregivers and create a tax credit for adults providing in-home care to aging relatives.

Gillibrand has focused her proposals on providing greater economic stability for caregivers, including legislation that would allow eligible caregivers to earn Social Security retirement credits and guarantee workers partial paid leave when they need time away from their jobs to care for family members or deal with serious medical events.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another member of the Aging Committee, told me the sandwich generation feels the affordability crisis especially acutely because there’s little families can cut back on without sacrificing care for the people who depend on them most.

“It’s a reminder how desperately we need to make changes in this economy,” she said. “Billionaires are sucking up all the value and working families are getting left further and further behind.”