Researchers have found increasing age gaps between generations in families, leading to people becoming grandparents (and great-grandparents) at later ages.

Kathy L. is a 46-year-old mother of three in North Carolina. Five years ago, she moved her family back to her hometown in order to help care for her ageing parents, but for the past year and a half, the family has devoted significant time and resources to caring for her husband’s aunt, who has dementia. Her children were ages 15, 11 and 9 when the aunt came to live with them last summer.

Initially, the plan was to care for the aunt at their home for 12 weeks, at which point her long-term care insurance would kick in to cover the cost of an assisted living facility. But after 8 weeks, the family decided to pay out of pocket to move her into one.

“Our family hit a breaking point,” Kathy L. told HuffPost.

“Dementia patients can often get aggressive because they are confused/scared and don’t know what’s going on,” she explained.

While her two older sons were able to handle the aunt’s outbursts, her youngest child struggled. Kathy L. said her 9-year-old daughter was “crying every day and was terrified to say or do anything that would set her off”.

In addition, her husband was granted power of attorney for his aunt, taking care of her finances and clearing out and selling her home.

In spite of these challenges, Kathy L. says the experience of providing this care wasn’t all negative. “I also feel very honoured to be able to help,” she said. “There are a lot of layers of feelings involved.”

People like Kathy L. who find themselves in the dual – and at times competing – roles of providing child care and elder care simultaneously are sometimes referred to as the “sandwich generation”.

With an ageing population and a declining fertility rate globally, more and more families are likely to find themselves in this situation

A research group at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, Germany, headed by Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, recently published a paper entitled Projections of Human Kinship for All Countries.

Using data from the UN World Population Prospects 2022 report (the most recent year available), researchers were able to make probabilistic predictions of what the families of the future will look like.

One important finding is that family networks – measured by the number of biological relatives a person has – are going to get smaller. (While the researchers understand that family can mean much more than the people who are biologically related to you, for the purposes of this research, they did not include other kinship relations such as spouses, in-laws, adopted........

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