Welcome to The Hoagie Files. We are space dedicated to those of you raising our children and caring for your elderly parents. Your world is a reality that few of you prepared for; you may have thought about it and you may have worried about. But much like childbirth and parenting, until you experience what it’s like to live in the Sandwich Generation, only then can you truly appreciate what it involves.

The phrase Sandwich Generation was first coined in the early 1980s by Dorothy Miller and Elaine Brody, two sociologists who studied elder care. Originally their definition encompassed women who provided care for their children and family, while also working and helping out their own parents. But now the term is associated with adults who simultaneously care for their parents and their children.

What’s interesting about the Sandwich Generation is that it isn’t stagnant, unlike the Silent or Greatest Generation, which is tied to the years people are born. Being of the Sandwich Generation is linked to certain age group – not the years in which you were born.

Today, approximately 70 percent of Gen Xers and older Millennials fall into the Sandwich Generation; people born from between 1965 and 1983. According to the Pew Research nearly 90 percent of people born within this years have a parent 65 years or older and children under the age of 18, or have an adult child that they support financially.