Sandwich Generation
D3 Writing — the generation squeezed by older generation and the younger generation after
Today I would like to discuss and write about Sandwich Generation. In Indonesia, this term is quite familiar to many people. Based on my observation around me, or even the data from the articles says the same. there are a lot of aspect that I would like to explore regarding this topic, including root causes, individual effects and broader impact to society. Furthermore, is how we could prevent or minimalize this sandwich generation situation.
Quick disclaimer, based from the articles that become my resource, it’s hard to maping the aspect like what’s go through my head, because the mapped data on this topic can be fragmented, in this writing I am gonna jump from one to the other subtopic randomly rather than by arrangement and science data.
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Sandwich generation basically refers to individuals squeezed by two roles or responsibility between the elder one (often comes from role as a child for parents, these individual should act as a caregiver for their parent) and the younger generation after them such as their children or even siblings, caregiver here means someone who provide financially and other things. these terms often refer to financially dependent on this very individual.
what cause these situasion?
Basically it could be anything. from the parents age causing their retirement so they don’t have the income to support themselves, or the parent inability to getting out from the stuctural poverty, so they walk away from the responsibility to provide for their children and passing those responsibility to their child. For younger generation the dependant siblings basically coming from parent inability to provide while they were still underage who doesn’t have resources to provide themselves or the dependant children that automatically became the responsibility for this individual as parent.
The effects for this indivdual as sandwich generation can be various, they might be couldn’t taking care of themselves decently because their time, resource and financial goes to the three generation. In this economy, could you imagine or counting how much your income, so you could cover up for a lot of people with good amount. building personal saving often feels like impossible luxury. The fact is many individual right now live in poverty, and another living in middle class income and the small part is from the rich side. So talking fact from sandwich generation point of view, it doesn’t cover up. Sometimes this individual making sacrifice of themselves to provide the others, surpressing their need or even making theirself live in minimum financial, so they can split the income for the needs of others.
These data could serves as a baseline for general condition sandwich generation in our society and how this exact situation affecting the economy and could be baseline indicator for broader economic vulnerability.
