A mix of financial, emotional, and logistical pressures
The sandwich generation may be funding childcare, school fees, medical care, prescription drugs, and home modifications for elderly parents—all while saving for retirement.
In Korea, AIA found that these people experience higher stress and caregiving-related fatigue. They express concerns about their own retirement preparedness and the future availability of care. These concerns appear across Asia where dual caregiving is pervading society.
“The most common source of stress is lack of time, and the second is financial,” said Grace Cheng, founder of the Hong Kong-based social enterprise Agewhale, which provides services for families in the city with caregiving needs.
Sandwiched employees carry their challenges into the workplace. Relative to their counterparts, they report higher levels of family-related interference with work and take sick leave more often.ii iii
“We’ve heard from people that they have to work fewer hours, pass on a promotion or even resign because they couldn’t manage everything,” says Grace Cheng, who also helps companies with workplace programmes for sandwich generation employees.
Navigating childcare and elder care
Like all parents, those in the sandwich generation are dealing with perennial parenting concerns like education and health. Nowadays, kids’ health concerns increasingly include developmental challenges, such as impediments to speech, motor skills, and learning, as well as mental health.
In addition, parents today are grappling with the higher cost of education. Many in Asia want to send their children abroad for school or university, introducing complexities with currencies and setting up foreign accounts.
An added challenge: in some countries, such as Korea, kids are living with and remaining financially dependent on their parents for longer than in the past.
In many cases, what makes the sandwich generation particularly vulnerable is the responsibility of caring for ageing parents. Parents’ needs can be less predictable and more acute – dementia, impaired mobility, multiple medications. The cost is emotional as well as financial.
“When a crisis occurs, if the parents can’t afford it, then responsibility naturally falls on the children, and it’s usually not something they’ve budgeted for,” says Grace Cheng.
Waiting too long to ask for help
For several years, AIA Korea has offered services that could be used by policyholders’ family members, including parents and children. However, many families sought help only after a diagnosis rather than when a concern first surfaced.
It’s a pattern observed in other markets, especially for elders who may resist help.
“A common attitude is, ‘My dad seems fine, he’s going to yum cha and playing mahjong,’” says Grace Cheng, who encourages people to act before a health event arises.
From access to empowerment
Another barrier to asking for help: feeling bewildered by options. People can turn to various sources of help, from government services to insurance and civic originations like Agewhale. But support must be easy to understand. And people need encouragement to use it sooner than later, as well as help navigating options.
“The support family caregivers need is often at the point when they have to make a decision about care,” said Janice Chia, founder and Managing Director of Ageing Asia, which advocates for the senior community. “In these moments, do they know whom to contact, how much things will cost, what service provider is best placed to support them?”
Insurance is adapting to the needs of the sandwich generation. In the Chinese Mainland, AIA helps policyholders find the right care options by screening caregiving service providers for qualifications and safety standards, and monitoring the delivery of services.
Another adaption is covering wider range of conditions to include those that are common among juveniles as well as those that seniors are prone to contract. For example, some AIA critical illness policies cover children’s issues such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, as well as ageing related conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.
Through more frequent and targeted communications, AIA Korea is encouraging customers to make active use of preventative services available to parents and children. This includes health check-ups and specialist referrals, so that care can begin before a diagnosis triggers the need for in-person support like home care.
And AIA offers educational savings products that can be structured to provide cash when needed to cover school fees. Savers can choose from multiple currencies to help fund a child’s overseas education.
A logical next front for insurance would be offering coverage through employee benefits programmes. That would help make support more accessible and mitigate the productivity-sapping effects of sandwiched living.
As Asia ages, dual caregiving is becoming a defining stage of life for many people. How well health systems, companies, governments, and civil groups support the sandwich generation will affect how successfully societies adapt to the realities of a graying population.
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