When you think of context-switching as a problem for software developers, you probably think of bouncing between your chat platform and your IDE, getting distracted by constant alerts, or changing gears from code review to performance review. At Stack Overflow, we’ve certainly given these challenges plenty of thought.
But for many developers, these aren’t the biggest context-switching challenges they face. They’re also parenting young children while simultaneously taking care of their aging parents. These are the developers in the sandwich generation.
Having family or other non-coding responsibilities competing for your attention isn’t a new problem for developers, of course. And multigenerational living and caregiving is the norm in many communities. But in the US, where there is limited public policy support for parents, caregivers, and elderly people, the number of people in the “sandwich generation” is rising—and that’s not a neutral fact.
As more developers and technologists start caring for kids and older adults at the same time, it’s worth asking how they are managing their see-saw of responsibilities and what kind of impact this trend could have on a generation of software developers.
Stuck in the middle
How many people are juggling parenting along with caring for their own parents? Estimates vary, but the number is on the rise. A 2022 study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that at least 2.5 million people in the US fell into the sandwich generation. According to that figure, almost one in four of the adults caring for at least one parent over 65 is also caring for at least one child under 18. By October 2024, The Wall Street Journal put the number of Americans in the sandwich generation at 11 million. Whatever the exact figure right now, it’s likely to rise even further as boomers and millennials age.
“People are having children later, and they are living longer, often with care-intensive conditions such as dementia,” write Vanessa Fuhrmans and Veronica Dagher in the WSJ. “That means many are taking care of elderly parents when their own kids are still young and require more intensive parenting—and for longer stretches of their lives than previous generations of sandwiched caregivers.” I’m a good example of these macro-level trends: I’m 38; my twins are two and a half; my parents, one of whom suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, are 68 and 75. Both they and my kids will need care for years to come.
Almost a third of the sandwich generation are millennials or Gen Z; 75% of us work full-time or part-time.
People in their 40s are most likely to be members of the sandwich generation, according to the Pew Research Center. According to a 2023 AARP report cited in the WSJ article, the average age of a sandwich generation caregiver is 44. A growing percentage are millennials, or people born between 1981 and 1996, according to a 2023 survey released by New York Life. Almost a third of the sandwich generation are millennials or Gen Z; 75% of us work full-time or part-time. And while women were once the near-exclusive providers of both child- and eldercare, a growing share of caregivers in the sandwich generation are men (welcome to the party, guys).
Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey, though focused on the global community rather than the US alone, found that about 70% of developers are between 25 and 54, with about 33% between 35 and 54—a prime age for finding oneself a member of the sandwich generation.
Under pressure
As you might expect, members of the sandwich generation face more financial and emotional strain than their peers. As a group, they make financial sacrifices and undertake major, frequently expensive lifestyle changes to make caregiving feasible.
They’re also likely to find themselves wedged between time-consuming, mentally and emotionally draining responsibilities at a critical moment in their professional careers. Just as many of them are moving from junior positions into more senior roles, and might hope to have more energy to devote to their work, they find themselves tapped out.
Like parenting and writing code, eldercare requires constant context-switching. Sandwich generation caregivers may need to be care coordinators, transportation providers, cooks, housekeepers, therapists, and companions for their elderly family members. They dispense medication and provide personal care. They’re also sysadmins who moonlight as cybersecurity consultants—setting up a new wireless network one day and the next fending off phishing attacks targeting a parent with dementia. This is all in addition to the (often similar!) roles they fill for the children in their care.
Tech support and cybersecurity
Providing tech support and protecting against cybersecurity threats are crucial, inescapable aspects of caring for older adults. One survey of sandwich generation caregivers found that fully 100% of them help their parents with tech support tasks and 87% are worried about their parents being impacted by a data breach or other security/privacy issue. Among the general population, this number drops to 74%, showing that the sandwich generation is much more concerned, and with good reason, about their parents’ vulnerability to data breaches.
After my dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he fell prey to several bad actors who claimed they were helping him install antivirus software (spoiler: it was spyware). According to the FBI, more than 101,000 adults over 60 filed reports of elder fraud with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2023, a 14% increase over 2022. Scams targeting people over 60 cost $3.4 billion in 2023, an 11% increase over 2022. The average victim of elder fraud in 2023 lost almost $34,000.
As with many crimes, the real number of victims is almost certainly much higher, because many—perhaps even most—victims don’t file official reports. People who have been victims of elder fraud and other financial crimes are often too embarrassed or ashamed to make a formal complaint. Or, as with my dad, they struggle to understand what happened and how they were exposed, which makes it next to impossible to report the incident or prevent it from happening again.
Elder and estate law
If you’re a caregiver for an older person, chances are you have a significant administrative workload in addition to the financial and emotional burdens you’re carrying.
You might also need to establish power of attorney, set up trusts to protect your loved one’s assets, designate healthcare proxies, figure out what type of long-term care is necessary and how to pay for it, determine exactly what long-term care insurance covers and how to qualify for it, and understand what kind of support is available from the government in the form of Social Security and Medicare, among much else. If that sounds like an entire job on top of your day-to-day caregiving responsibilities (not to mention your actual job), you have the right idea.
Another grim reality of caregiving is that the administrative work doesn’t end immediately if and when your elderly relative dies. Funeral costs, probate, and estate disbursement wait on the other side.
The kids are not all right
The costs shouldered by the sandwich generation are considerable: They struggle both financially and emotionally compared to people who are taking care of aging parents but not children under 18. University of Michigan researchers found that “overall, sandwich generation caregivers were twice as likely to report financial difficulty (36% vs. 17%) and more likely to report substantial emotional difficulty (44% vs. 32%) than their peers who only act as caregiver to a parent over 65.”
More than half of respondents reported sacrificing their own financial security to care for their parents in addition to their kids.
In the 2023 New York Life survey, nine out of ten sandwich generation adults said they made changes to their lifestyle or financial plan because of childcare or eldercare responsibilities. More than half of respondents reported sacrificing their own financial security to care for their parents in addition to their kids. A third of respondents cut back on other expenses, 26% contributed less or nothing to their savings, and 26% took on more debt.
Caregiving in just one direction at a time can be time-consuming and emotionally draining, so being sandwiched between parenting and parenting the parents exacerbates the problem. For sandwich generation caregivers, every hour spent helping Dad reconnect to the internet or driving Mom to the doctor is an hour that can’t be spent with their kids, can’t be spent writing or reviewing code, connecting with colleagues, catching up on sleep, getting some exercise…you get the idea.
“One thing I had to juggle constantly was weighing each interaction between my child and mother and trying to curate experiences that provided each the most benefit and the least emotional harm.”
And it’s not just opportunity cost that sandwich caregivers have to account for. Facilitating positive interactions between kids and the older people in their care can be a continual challenge. A senior software developer at Stack Overflow who managed his mother’s medical care while parenting a school-age child put it this way: “One thing I had to juggle constantly wasn’t just the opportunity cost of time spent with my parent vs. child, but also constantly weighing each interaction between my child and mother and trying to curate experiences that provided each the most benefit and the least emotional harm.”
This strikes a sad chord with my own experiences, especially since my dad has moved into memory care. Seeing a grandparent physically ill, confused and disoriented, or in an unfamiliar hospital setting can upset kids. But in a sandwich caregiving situation, these hard moments are often unavoidable. That adds to the emotional load sandwich caregivers already carry.
Inevitable tradeoffs
As we mentioned, people in their 40s are most likely to fall into the sandwich generation, with an increasing number of thirty-somethings joining their ranks as millennials age and more of us start taking care of both parents and kids. Inconveniently, this is the same age range when most professional developers tend to move from junior roles into more senior positions: “the critical early-to-middle stages of their careers,” as the WSJ article puts it.
In other words, even as their skills and experience start to yield more exciting opportunities and satisfying projects, many mid-career developers are being stretched thin with caretaking responsibilities. That’s an issue not just for individual developers but for dev-centric organizations everywhere—even, potentially, for the national economy. As the WSJ article puts it, the 11 million adults in the sandwich generation bear a growing burden that includes “a drag on monthly budgets and long-term financial health.” Zooming out, this demographic trend could pose what one strategist termed “a massive risk to the US economy.”
Certainly, the downstream effects of a generation of developers whose financial and emotional well-being is compromised by sandwich caregiving will be significant and wide-ranging. For example: remote work. Sandwich caregiving responsibilities and schedules are incompatible with sweeping return-to-office mandates. Companies embracing inflexible return-to-office policies may find that a growing percentage of senior devs are taking their talents elsewhere or, as many developers did during the pandemic-era Great Resignation, opting for self-employment. “I know that I would not have ever considered a job that wasn’t 100% remote this past year unless I was absolutely forced to,” said the senior software engineer who managed his mother’s medical care. My thoughts exactly.
People weighed down by caregiving responsibilities might also be less likely to take on ambitious work projects or launch all-consuming startups. (The expression “There aren’t enough hours in the day” comes to mind.) Similarly, it’s reasonable to wonder about the effect on software development teams if more seasoned developers have less time and energy to devote to planning and design. Will junior developers step into the breach? And how many of those junior developers, though they may be unencumbered by childcare and eldercare responsibilities right now, will take on those duties over the next several years? In the absence of their more seasoned colleagues, could less-experienced developers develop an overreliance on GenAI coding tools that can create a headache for every roadblock they remove? If you have thoughts, let us know in the comments.
Are you a developer or a technologist balancing childcare and eldercare? What are the biggest challenges you face? Have you built any tools or solutions that have made sandwich caregiving easier?
Maybe you’ve found or built a tool to help with the repetitive work involved in caregiving. It might be a sandbox to allow an aging parent to write code without inadvertently erasing their computer. It might be an app designed to help people with dementia manage daily tasks. This software designer and engineer set up an e-ink display to meet the needs of a parent with permanent anterograde amnesia. Likewise, let us know in the comments.