The rise of the ‘sandwich generation’
Millions of us now live in extended family households – but is this is a good thing or a bad thing? Kate Whiting writes…
When I was about six, I had a nice little earner. My grandfather used to pay me 50p for every bucket of stones I managed to pull out of his vegetable patch.
We’d just moved in to a new house – me, my sister, mum and dad, my grandfather and mentally disabled uncle – and there were a lot of stones to collect.
That summer, I must have literally raked in, ooh about five quid. But to a little girl, that was riches beyond my wildest dreams – and an awful lot of penny sweets.
For the money-motivated me, it was undoubtedly one of the best things about living with my grandfather – that, and being allowed to watch EastEnders when my parents went out for the evening and left him and my uncle in charge.
These days, such large family groups living under one roof is increasingly the norm.
According to stats from the Office of National Statistics, more than three million of us live in households with five other people, and census data showed 543,000 homes with at least six people.
The report links this to the rise in the so-called “sandwich generation”, with adults increasingly caring for kids and their aged parents, and many fully-grown children unable to afford to fly the nest.
As such, we’re living in a real-life version of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, with Grandpa Joe, Grandma Josephine, Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina all topping and tailing in the same bed.
And there’s the biggest rub in this rubbing-along-together lifestyle: lack of space. Where do you go for a little quiet, me-time if granny’s in the bath, dad’s watching TV and you have to share a room with your little sister or brother?
On the plus-side though, you’ll never be lonely.
I lived with my grandfather until he passed away at the ripe old age of 86, when I was 14. For more than half of my life, he’d done the school runs, allowing both my parents to work, dropping us off in his weathered old Nissan.
The money this would have saved my folks in after-school childcare is unquestionable.
Besides being a babysitter, he was also the head gardener – a real old war hero, who believed in digging for victory, hence the veggie patch.
In the summer, we had more potatoes, raspberries and runner beans than we knew what to do with – and even now, we’re still reaping the benefits of his green fingers, with a bumper crop of delicious Discovery apples each year.
Undoubtedly, through the rose-tinted NHS specs of a six-year-old, it was blissful living with my grandfather, but when he started suffering from Alzheimer’s, the situation became incredibly stressful for my parents, torn between full-time jobs, children and a rapidly declining octogenarian.
But they wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement, as no doubt it is for many of the half a million extended families living together in Britain today – and more importantly than that, everyone wanted to live together.
One day, I hope to be able to look after my parents, and I would love for my son to grow up in the same house as them, with their views from a different generation offering him a totally different perspective on the world.
Because this, with his stone-collecting “work hard for a living” ethic, was what my grandfather gave me.
Do you have any extended family living with you. Is your nest empty or do you have any ‘boomerang’ kids?
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