“There was a day where I was nursing a baby during a conference call and simultaneously searching for ramp installers online,” says Mona Shand of Brighton, MI. She and her husband help care for her 81-year-old father, who is wheelchair-bound and suffers from Parkinson's disease, and their three children, ages 5, 3, and 1, while balancing full-time jobs.
The Shands are members of the sandwich generation, a colloquial term for those caring for kids and aging family members simultaneously. It's a demographic that's becoming increasingly crowded. In a recent poll from A Place for Mom, Inc. (APFM), the nation's largest senior-living referral information service, more than half of the respondents (95 percent of whom were parents) said an older family member is either already living in their home or expected…
