The author notes that families can alleviate the burden associated with caring for aging parents and young children, but this requires having difficult conversations.
There is a generation of South Africans who silently try to support both sides of the family, often wondering how long they can continue to manage it alone. On one side are children needing payment for education, transport, food, emotional support, and help at the start of adult life. On the other side are elderly parents who may need help with grocery shopping, doctor visits, medication, household expenses, or simply reassurance that someone is looking after them.
This person, caught in the middle, is called the 'sandwich generation,' and many of them experience exhaustion. The circumstances in South Africa make this pressure particularly difficult.
According to the 2022 census data from Statistics South Africa, about 9.8% of the population reached the age of 60 or older, meaning millions of elderly South Africans whose care needs are likely to increase as the population ages. At the other end of the family, financial independence does not always come quickly. The problem of persistent youth unemployment in South Africa forces many parents to support their children long after school or university graduation.
Unemployment Rate
Statistics SA's Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2024 recorded an unemployment rate among youth aged 15 to 34 at 45.5%. Behind these percentages are ordinary households. Examples include a 48-year-old woman paying for a teenager's school trip and helping her mother buy medicine; a father worried about gas money for an unemployed adult child while simultaneously organizing a doctor's appointment for his own father; a couple stretching their income between children, parents, and their own budget before they can think about retirement.
The cost of this burden is not limited to finances. Constant responsibility can lead to chronic stress, sleep problems, irritability, anxiety, and emotional burnout. The South African Depression and Anxiety Group has repeatedly emphasized the importance of recognizing when constant stress begins to interfere with daily life and seeking help instead of waiting until someone reaches a breaking point.
Caregiver burnout doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it is forgetting to take medication, crying over small things, losing patience with loved ones, feeling resentful when the phone rings because someone probably needs something, or sleepless nights spent worrying about children, parents, money, and tomorrow.
Then comes guilt
When you spend time helping an elderly parent, you worry that your children are being neglected. If you focus on the children, you doubt whether you need to help your parents. And if you take a day off, it can feel like you have abandoned everyone. Families are capable of easing this load, but it requires complex conversations.
Firstly, it is necessary to stop allowing one person to become the emergency department for the entire family. Siblings should discuss the distribution of caregiving responsibilities for elderly parents instead of assuming the most reliable child will take everything on. Older children can participate in household chores. Partners should also recognize that picking up children, administrative tasks at school, caregiving, and organization are also work.
It is also worth asking the difficult question: does this person need my help, or am I just used to doing it for them? An adult child who can make an appointment independently probably should. An elderly parent who can manage some aspects of daily life might benefit from maintaining that independence. Helping someone does not always mean complete replacement.
Money also needs boundaries
Constant financial rescue of relatives can lead to a middle-aged person approaching retirement without adequate protection for themselves. And caregivers must have the right to include their own priorities. This might mean carpooling children to school, asking a sibling to accompany a parent to an appointment, getting a personal medical check-up, meeting a friend, getting proper sleep, or having the ability to say, 'I cannot do this today.'
Most importantly, exhaustion should never be mistaken for love. Caring for children and parents does not require disappearing from one's own life. Because when the person holding everyone together finally runs out of reserves, there will be very little left to hold this 'sandwich' together.