The peanut butter-and-jelly of that generation sandwich here! And this, is still, NOT a good trend, as it puts pressures both on the younger (the middle age group) as well as the older (the elderly parents’), generations here, off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
Hsiung (a false name) in his fifties, was originally a mid-level office manager, to care for his aging parents, he’d retired, and since, he’d derailed from the rest of the outside world, became, a middle aged cocooner; recently he’d wanted to return back to the workforce, but couldn’t find a job. The parents in their eighties living with their unemployed cocooning adult children in their fifties, causing the household to fall below the poverty lines, or lacking that social support network, Japan called this problem that rose from society “Problem 8050”. The secretary of Family Foundation, Chen told, that the middle aged cocooners are a new problem the long-term care realm in Taiwan is facing currently.
Last week the publisher, Yuan-Liou Publishing introduced the Japanese sociologist, Kitagawa’s “80/50—the Intertwined Generation’s of Family Hardships”, a first in Taiwan, on the subject of middle age cocooner’s life.
and what that, looked, like
In 2019, there was a shocking murder, the seventy-something former diplomat murdered his own forty-something cocooning son. Just two months before the incident, Japan just posted its statistics on cocooners in Japan, estimated that there are about 610,000 from the age group of forty to sixty-four, middle aged to elderly cocooners.
The investigations found, that thirty-six percent of these middle aged individuals’ reasons for not working, staying at home was quitting their jobs. They had been laid off due to the economy, or to care for their aging parents, and once they went home, they couldn’t, get out of the doors.
The publisher also did a small field research on the matter, and interviewed the middle age group of cocooners here, or families with cocooners. Like Ji-Wei who’s closing to forty, couldn’t find a job that fitted to his parents’ ideals, and fell many times at work, and started, isolating himself from all social activities, locked himself in at home. He stated that he’d worked so very hard, to live up to his parents’ expectations of him, and yet, he’d, let them down, again, and again, “I don’t think I can make it!”
Chen told, that most cocooners in Taiwan are single, never married, or that they got defeated, beaten at work, and other members of their families demanded that they come home to live, to help care for the parents. And, of the service calls the foundation received, the parents who are cared for by their adult children, the adult children who are caring for their parents are on one another’s bad sides, to the extent of behaving violently toward each other. The children told, “we’d come home to help care for our parents, but in our other siblings’ view, it’s because we can’t amount to anything that’s why we’d started, living back at home”, and, the interlocked interactions between the generations, it’s a new issue that the Taiwanese society will now face, in the dual compound of aging society and the rate of unemployment on the rise.
And so, that, is still, a vicious cycle here, and, once you start cycling in this, it’s, next-to-impossible for you to get out, because the resentment will build up between you and your parents, you and your siblings, and then, you finally CRACK, and, chances are, there will be, MORE murders happening, due to this trend that’s currently, happening right now.