How to Survive the Sandwich Generation: Put Your Kids to Work

Midlifers are squeezed by as many as eight challenging roles at a time, from work to raising kids to caring for aging parents to dealing with a disease diagnosis. Yes, the so-called “sandwich generation” is a real thing.

These roles can overload us, but they can also help build midlifers’ sense of identity and mastery if we streamline our priorities. Midlife is primetime for creating efficiencies. And some of the best examples involve a very inefficient-seeming category of human: young kids.

Prime Efficiency #1: Combine fitness with your to-do list

Many of us understand that exercise is a Prime Factor for thriving in midlife and later, but exercise often gets squeezed by responsibilities like work, errands and caregiving. We skip the gym to pick up the milk, answer a teacher’s email about a kid’s bad behavior, take an equally misbehaving car to the mechanic, etc.

But you can marry fitness to your to-do lists. At the supermarket, carry your shopping bags in hand instead of relying on the cart. After checkout, jog through the parking lot, still grasping the hand-weight groceries. Use a walking desk while promising the teacher your son will stop using his ruler as a catapult. Take a quick jog while waiting for your mechanic instead of spacing out in the lobby on your phone.

Researchers refer to these little exercise doses as Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity, or VILPA. They turn ordinary moments into brief bursts of movement that raise your heart rate. Looking at fitness tracker data, Australian researchers found people who get these daily bursts have considerably better health outcomes than those with no physical activity.

An important point is that these bursts are helpful but not ideal on their own—you wouldn’t want your exercise regimen to consist only of VILPA. Research compares the benefits of VILPA to non-exercisers, quite a low bar. Strive for more sustained exercise when you’re able to fit it in.

On your busiest days, though, VILPA can keep health from falling off the map.

Prime Efficiency #2: Hire your kid as your personal trainer

In between real workouts, the strategic midlifer takes VILPA to the next level, turning it into what might be called VILPAK, or Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity with your Kids.

We want to spend quality time with those little balls of energy bouncing off the walls, right? They may seem like a distraction from your workout, but when you put on your Midlife Master of Efficiency goggles, a prepubescent physical trainer may appear. To combine kid-time with exercise-time, let your kid guide you through heart-pumping races around the living room, Godzilla-Kong pillow fights or Floor is Lava.

Prime Efficiency #3: Embrace your kid’s absurdity

I’ve been fortunate to stay friends with people I started hanging out with decades ago. Back in our 20s, silliness defined us. In middle-age, our conversations have become more mellow. Humor creeps in only occasionally. Our text threads, once crammed with jokes, are mostly functional and to-the-point.

I’ve found little research on midlife humor. Sadly, funding agencies aren’t supporting the study of middle-aged funny-bone degeneration. Apparently the world has other problems! But humor is clearly part of enjoying life, and some research does show that adult play reduces stress and improves cognitive flexibility.

If more studies were conducted on middle-aged people, I think they’d show that, as midlifers juggle serious roles, they often forget how to let go and smile. The crush of responsibilities leaves little room for play, absurdity, spontaneity and the daily ridiculousness that prevents total overwhelm. Sometimes life is a dish best served light.

Enter Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Ridiculous Activity, or VILRA. And let’s throw kids into the efficiency pot again. As with exercise, kids are fantastic natural comedians. They find jokes in the forbidden, the strange, and the endlessly hilarious fact that you’re trying to keep a straight face. They bring a vitality and energy to humor that many adults can’t mount on their own.

Laughter is a basic need. Parenting can work hand-in-glove with meeting it.

Occasionally I dread taking my 11-year-old to a doctor’s appointment, worried about missing a chunk of my workday. Then I realize I haven’t smiled once so far that day. I remind myself that—if I get into the right head space—the ride to the appointment and back can be filled with my son’s funny stories and cracking me up with his bizarre hypotheticals. We’ll be riffing back and forth on something so many times, I forget the joke that started it. Just like with my same-age friends back in the day.

Laughter is a basic need. It’s a priority just like work, daily exercise or eating healthfully, and parenting can work hand-in-glove with ensuring we meet this need.

The field of habit psychology points to various tricks to create efficiencies among competing priorities, like combining, sequencing, reframing or—my favorite—turning one obligation into a vehicle for another. One other example: I recently listened to a podcast with the Atlantic CEO Nick Thompson discussing his custom, when invited to speak at a conference overseas, of getting the conference to pay for him and his foodie son to visit a top local restaurant. Adding that one to my repertoire.

Parting idea: Kids are often framed as the ultimate time-thieves. I know that fear; it was part of my own resistance to having them into my mid-30s. But one of the surprises of parenting is that the same little people who complicate your schedule and spill their fruit punch on your computer can also catalyze movement, humor and other efficiencies I’d never have had without them.

Over to you: what do VILPAK and VILRA look like in your house?