Sandwich Generation

Few international studies have been conducted on multigenerational caregiving. One study conducted by Maaike Dautzenberg and colleagues (1998) examined the prevalence of women in the middle in the Netherlands. Limiting their population-based sample to women aged 40 to 54, the authors found that 29 percent of respondents cared for children in the home as well as parents or parents-in-law. Moreover, these mothers also provided care to adult children living outside of the home and to grandchildren. If a broader definition of care were utilized, 34 percent of the sample would have met the criteria of multi-generational caregiving. Other studies involving small non-representative samples of women from Canada (Raphael and Schlesinger 1994; Schlesinger and Raphael 1992) and Israel (Remennick 1999) also provide documentation of women caring for both aging parents and children of varying ages.