# More Than the Sum of Multiple Care: Ambivalence in Sandwich Care

## TL;DR

This paper explores the complex emotional experiences of people caring for both children and elderly parents, known as sandwich carers, and introduces a new theoretical framework to understand their challenges.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel theoretical framework that captures the temporal, socially structured, and policy-contextual aspects of ambivalence in sandwich care.

## Key findings

- Ambivalence in sandwich care arises from the intersection of historical and future family relationships with gendered expectations and care policies.
- The framework shows how social structures and policies can both increase and mitigate feelings of ambivalence in sandwich carers.
- The study provides a generalizable model for understanding sandwich care experiences across different cultural contexts.

## Abstract

A growing population in economically developed societies are simultaneously providing childcare and older adult care, or sandwich care. The existing studies reveal that sandwich carers are more physically, mentally and financially challenged than those providing dyadic care. This article explores an understudied area of sandwich care and ambivalence. Ambivalence encompasses the difficulties, challenges, and range of feelings, including guilt, anger, isolation, sense of duty, fulfilment and many others that sandwich carers' experience. Building on the existing sociological approach to ambivalence, this paper proposes a theoretical framework for delineating the entangled structural and relational webs where sandwich carers' experiences and negotiations are situated. Our theoretical framework captures the temporal, socially structured and policy‐contextual properties of ambivalence. We argue that ambivalence arises from historical and prospective family relationships (temporal) that intersect with the gendered expectations for parenting and family responsibility of adult social care (socially structured), which further intersects with care policy and available care services (policy contextual). The three qualities of ambivalence influence each other in multiple ways. Socially structured and temporal qualities of ambivalence can influence sandwich carers' access to and experience of using care services, but the social arrangement of care can also increase or mitigate ambivalence in sandwich care arising from them. While we illustrate this by drawing on considerable evidence from Japan, we argue that our study provides a useful theoretical framework attuned to understanding the experience of such carers in diverse social and cultural contexts.