I’m currently at the time in my life where my peers are taking up the banner of the “sandwich” generation – combining a family bike ride with a visit to check-in on an aging or widowed parent, or researching school admissions for their children while managing a change of living arrangement for their parents. As I observe how these everyday negotiations are managed by my friends and co-workers, it does make me think, “What if you work full-time and your parent needs assistance but doesn’t live nearby?” Furthermore, for the Generation X population without children, I wonder, “Who will be there in later years to help if needed?”
According to a 2015 report by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP Public Policy Institute about 5% of those who provide 21 or more hours of care per week and 8% of those who provide 20 hours or less of care per week live more than two hours away from the person they are helping. Long-distance caregiving, defined as caring for someone more than 100 miles away, is not straightforward when having to rearrange work, school, or family schedules to deal with responsibilities.
As a co-worker once reminded me, most caregiving does not go on indefinitely, yet the experience touches all of us at some point. After first posing these questions, I started to read about different solutions in use around the country and the world. Most of what I found are about turning to one another to form networks and pool resources through co-housing or home share solutions, village membership networks, cooperative exchanges, and affiliated groups’ caring collaboratives.
We all know people who are naturals at networking and making connections to get an idea started. The next step, often, is trying to train others to replicate the idea. It takes a lot of work, and sometimes these communal ideas thrive and other times fade away. The best solutions, I feel, are still out on the horizon. Virtual platforms that connect people directly to each other by matching a need with a skill in exchange, and remote monitoring technologies, seem to be the trend for the future. At the same time we need to find ways to build trust so we also feel safe and non-intrusive in choosing options for ourselves and with our parents who live far away.
Supportive networks need to make sure that time, cost, and task models take into account those with the most needs and/or least funds in ways that are seamlessly absorbed across the group as a whole. Otherwise it is a community safety net with a gaping hole. As I’ve learned in the disability rights movement, assistance is not only a one-way interaction, as everyone has something to contribute to the relationship and to society if systems are universally designed and flexible enough to include everyone.
Outside of our immediate families, we need to make more time to be there for one another, as well as ask others to help us. This is perhaps, in our independent and sometimes isolated communities, the hardest and most rewarding layer of the “sandwich” for my generation to embrace.
Read how employer and governmental policies can provide added support to these community based solutions and why the future of caregiving is becoming more critical to solve in the upcoming decades:
