A Generation of Caregivers

Even with her body full of painkillers, she doesn't have the strength to sit up.

So Mary Flanagan stretches her withered arms out to her daughter at her bedside.

Dee Toole cradles the family matriarch, raising the 85-year-old woman upright.

Toole kisses the gray strands on top of mother's head.

For the second time in a week, Toole has brought her mother, who has Alzheimer's disease, to the North Broward Medical Center in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

During this visit last month, Toole cringes as her mother grimaces in pain, a result of her muscles tightening from a drug reaction.

"I don't want her to finish out her life this way," said Toole, 64, who moved her mother into her Coconut Creek apartment a year and a half ago. "That's not a life." Toole is among a growing number of adults -- many of them baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964 -- whose lives are consumed with visiting their parents in nursing homes and hospital rooms, or dressing and bathing them in the adult children's homes.

About 20 million adults are caring for their aging parents, according to the Family Caregiver Alliance, a San Francisco-based social service organization. The adult children do so while juggling their own lives.

Experts call these baby boomers part of the "sandwich generation," referring to those who are raising a child, supporting adult children or caring for aging parents. And their double duties are likely to last for some time as boomers are having children later and their elderly parents are living longer.

That leads to hard questions: How do I stave off retirement? How do I juggle work and caregiving? How do I avoid stripping my parents of their independence?

Children of the sandwich generation -- saddled with debt and the rising costs of owning a home -- are leaning on their parents heavily for financial support.

"There are more people caring for their aging parents right now than there are people caring for their own children," said Edith Lederberg, executive director of the Aging and Disability Resource Center of Broward County, Fla.

Two in 10 boomers financially support a parent, according to a survey of about 1,000 baby boomers last year by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.