The Family Squeeze

The Sandwich Generation refers to the growing numbers of middle-aged people who must care for both children and elderly parents while trying to manage the stress of full-time jobs. 'Everything they say is practical and useful.' - Globe and Mail

Your teenagers are active, your parents are aging, and your wrinkles aren't shrinking. Pointed guidance and lotsa laughter - Phil Callaway style! - give you the grin to "middle age" with grace and style.

One of TIME’s Best New Books to Read This Summer “Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed Families today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects—from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses—have been wrung out by a system that doesn’t support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Writtenin the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezed is an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful, it casts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors.

When you could neither talk nor stand life’s hourglass still filled with sand, I gently held your tiny hand and gave it three soft squeezes. When you awoke within the night And cried from fear and called for light, I held you safe with all my might and gave you three long squeezes. Follow a father and his son from babyhood to baseball games to graduation and beyond in this loving saga about the unbreakable bond between generations. A perfect gift, Three Squeezes is a tender, rhyming picture book that is an ode to the love between parent and child, no matter how old the child (or) parent is.

Your teenagers are active, your parents are aging, and your wrinkles aren't shrinking. Pointed guidance and lotsa laughter - Phil Callaway style! - give you the grin to "middle age" with grace and style.

Why, in the world's most affluent nation, are so many corporations squeezing their employees dry? In this fresh, carefully researched book, New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse explores the economic, political, and social trends that are transforming America's workplaces, including the decline of the social contract that created the world's largest middle class and guaranteed job security and good pensions. We meet all kinds of workers—white-collar and blue-collar, high-tech and low-tech, middle-class and low-income—as we see shocking examples of injustice, including employees who are locked in during a hurricane or fired after suffering debilitating, on-the-job injuries. With pragmatic recommendations on what government, business and labor should do to alleviate the economic crunch, The Big Squeeze is a balanced, consistently revealing look at a major American crisis.