Sandwich generation navigating work, elderly parents and kids at home

Sandwich generation navigating work, caring for elderly parents and older kids still living at home Sun 9 Aug 2026 at 5:18am I love Kylie Minogue for a lot of things, including great dance floor experiences. I also thank her for connecting me to an incredible family. I met Nicole at Kylie's Tension tour last year. She and a group of fellow nurses clad in sequins told me they would listen to me on the radio while driving around seeing patients. Now Nicole is treating a patient in her own home, and that involves more tension than Kylie's mirror balls. The patient is her partner Janelle's dad Ernie, who is 93. Ernie's tattoos are faded, his hair and teeth are sparse, and he has multiple health problems and frailties. But he still has a sparkle in his eye and so much optimism that he got a puppy when he was 90! This year, following a bad fall, he and that puppy Bella moved in with Nicole, Janelle and their teenage boys. What is the sandwich generation? Janelle is handy; she cleared the land and attached the granny flat to the sewer. She is tender, bathing and toileting her dad, shaving and dressing him, feeding him and entertaining him. She is also a supportive soccer mum for her boys, and she squeezes in a full-time job which, luckily, she can do at home. Janelle's desktop is a colour-coded diary of colliding appointments and care routines with a tab that allows her to check in on Ernie on a closed-circuit TV as he sits with a crochet rug on his knees and his dog wrapped around his neck. When Ernie's having a good day, Janelle can leave home to watch a son play football, while glancing from the field to her phone's Ernie-cam. Welcome to the multi-tasking, physically and emotionally demanding world of the sandwich generation. This is a silent army of more than 1.5 million Australians. Many are about Kylie Minogue's age, with a life in constant locomotion. This year the oldest of the baby boomers started turning 80. The generation that sang 'talking about my generation' are not fading away, they are living longer than any generation before them. And that's wonderful. But those extra decades of life are not full of dancing. They are full of complex health problems, increased frailty and dementia. This means a tsunami of care is coming and the sandwich generation is ever expanding as services are shrinking. We need 10,000 more aged care beds every year for our elders, and last year we produced just 800. The queue to be assessed for help in the home is long and the queue to then get the help is longer. People are waiting for up to a year for assistance, and 13 a day are dying before they get it. And who's filling the gap? The sandwich generation. Who is paying the price? The good news is the sandwich carers are saving the system billions. The bad news is we are overstretched and exhausted. And if we burn out, the whole system will fall over. Gohar Yazdabadi heads the Council on the Ageing in NSW; her job is to advocate for older Australians. But she now viscerally understands she needs to advocate for the sandwich generation who care for those elders. Recently Gohar's parents became critically unwell. Gohar moved into their home and her life became a churn of taking children to day care and school, and her parents to specialists and treatments. On top of all this, she was doing her paid job as well. But when Gohar asked for a spot for her daughter in after-school care, she was rebuffed. After months of no sleep and cortisol-fuelled care, she found herself extremely stressed and isolated. "They have a term for our condition — carer stress. But there's no pill for it." Gohar felt simultaneously being a burden on the system and being betrayed by that system. At this point, she considered leaving her job. In fact, about two-thirds of carers have reduced their hours at work due to the unpaid caring work at home. "You have this social contract with the government. You pay taxes and when you're old, you're going to be looked after," she says. "I think there is a huge realisation within the sandwich generation that that social contract has been broken." Gohar's father died waiting for care, and her mother died two months later. Now grieving for her parents, the experience has totally changed how Gohar does her work. "My job is to advocate for older Australians, but I now know they are part of a family system … it should be a no-brainer in public policy that we help carers do what they do best. Care." My own sandwich I meet a lot of Gohars, Janelles and Nicoles because I too am a member of the sandwich generation. I present a podcast called Club Sandwich, and I tell our story on the Compass episode, Sandwiched. My mum is 93, my mother-in-law is about to turn 95, and I have two "kidults" at home. In the past 15 years, I've helped Mum care for my dad and then cared for my mum in deep grief after his death. I've helped her clear the family home and move. I've got her through COVID, health complications and appointments. It's been a constant job I can't quit. No moving overseas, no long holidays, all care and all responsibility all at once. I love the sandwich generation who do this work while unpaid and unrecognised. They are strong, loving, caring, powerful women (and one quarter of them are men) who are buckling under the weight of responsibility and care. Trying to do their own life admin with the admin of Centrelink and the aged care and hospital systems. All are trying to be their best at work, their best at home and the best for their parent. But I worry for us because our own well-being often falls out of the sandwich. Australian Seniors says nine out of 10 carers have experienced burnout, with nearly half reporting emotional and physical exhaustion, sleep issues and financial stress. While filming for Compass, I got to pump iron with some of the sandwich brigade. Because while we carry the weight of generations of care, we are also trying to stay strong and reduce our own demands on the system in the future. The bigger questions We had 80 years to prepare for the baby boomers growing old, and we didn't. Governments have been in denial, families have been in denial, and our elders often deny they need help. Families are fracturing and people are buckling. We all need to face up and chew on this sandwich together. Gohar wants formal recognition of unpaid carers in childcare, health care and public policy. "If we don't look at everything through the caring lens, the system will collapse," she says. Author Lucinda Holdforth says we also need to ask some big questions about intergenerational inequity and the cost of longevity. She wants us to think deeply about over-treatment in hospitals and about the price of love on those squished in a sandwich of duty that is served with a side salad of rage, boredom, love and guilt. When she talked to me about the gratitude the nation owes to the sandwich generation, I admit I had a bit of a cry. Being seen is powerful. While we wait for recognition, there's one thing that keeps us going. To paraphrase Kylie Minogue, we don't need to prove we really love them, love them. Watch Sandwiched with Sarah Macdonald on Compass ABC TV Sunday 6:30pm and iview.