Alyssa Quart

There's a uniquely American burnout crisis in families.

A lot of people are now taking care of their aging parents, their adult kids and their grandkids.

And in qualitative research studies and their interviews with grandparents, and they really say, like, I'm aging, I'm tired, and I'm needed by everyone at the same time.

Like, I don't even know who to prioritize.

So people are, you know, they want to be involved with family and they want to help, but they're just being stretched to their limits.

Researchers talk about this beanpole effect where family trees are kind of getting longer and skinnier.

And this is because people are living longer on average.

So more generations are alive at one time.

But they're also getting thinner because people are having fewer children on average.

So that means fewer siblings, fewer cousins.

And now family bonds are kind of being defined by these things.

up and down bonds between grandparents, parents, children, great-grandparents.

And those are absolutely beautiful in their own way, but they tend to be sort of more formal.

You know, there's more of a hierarchy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And with families needing so much help, you know, they also are really a lot about care these days.

The expectations kind of keep rising.

You know, there's this term intensive parenting, which sort of refers to a parenting style that is very expensive and very time consuming.

And I think it's also just becoming more common to kind of

surveil kids all the time.