Two Generations, Retired And Together

Almost every morning, Lauri McBride, 62, a retired middle-school science teacher, spends a half-hour chatting with her father, William Fink, 88, while he eats breakfast. Most evenings, Ms. McBride returns for another 30 minutes as her father sips a martini.

“She pokes her head in and wants to know what I did yesterday,” joked Mr. Fink, who is widowed and retired from careers as an optician and an industrial arts teacher.

Ms. McBride visited her father twice a day even before she retired last June, since she’s right upstairs. She and her husband, John, 66, an I.T. consultant, rent the upper two floors of Mr. Fink’s <location idsrc=”xmltag.org” value=”LU/us.ny.brklyn”>Brooklyn brownstone. But that was only for brief hellos. “It was always rushed,” she recalled. “I feel like we’ve gotten closer now.”

Now that they are both retired, father and daughter even find time to go out to art museums and restaurants. This kind of relationship, with parents and offspring in the same family both retired, would have been almost unheard of in an earlier day. But dual-generation retirements have become more numerous, at least for the moment, thanks to a rare confluence of trends. Among them are increased life spans, the relatively young marriage age of the Greatest Generation and what may be the last wave of retirees with traditional pensions, which allow for more secure, even early, retirements.

“This is historically unprecedented, where you have older people and their still-older parents,” said Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota. “Families are having to figure out those intergenerational relationships.”

While the mutual leisure time can allow for nice talks and travel, too much unaccustomed togetherness can rankle, while caretaking responsibilities mount.

The main reason for dual retirements is that people are living longer. More than 11.2 million Americans were over age 80 in the 2010 United States census. Logically, many of those were parents of the 36.5 million baby boomers who were then hitting the classic retirement ages of 55 to 64.

In a survey of about 1,000 of the oldest boomers by the MetLife Mature Market Institute in 2012, 24 percent had a parent who was alive.

But to continue the trend, the 55-and-older group must retire young enough, while their parents are still alive. That situation may not continue. The 2008 recession led to many involuntary early retirements, but surveys show several indicators of later retirement — like the work force participation rate of those over age 55. The ages at which people say they expect to retire and their actual retirement ages have also been rising slowly and for the most part steadily for more than a decade.

People are also putting off having children, which will make it harder for such parents to survive until their daughters and sons retire. The average woman born in 1960 had her first child at 22.7, compared with 20.8 for her mother born in 1935, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say the dual-retirement phenomenon favors certain demographic groups. Employees are more likely to retire if they can count on secure pensions, but those were available to just 13 percent of the private sector work force in 2012, down from 39 percent in 1980, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, based in Washington.

Among the few careers still offering pensions are unionized, labor-intensive jobs. Those are the same categories of workers who often “won’t physically be able to defer retirement,” said Stewart D. Lawrence, head of the United States retirement practice at the Segal Group, a benefits consulting firm based in New York.

Another group of generally unionized workers, public sector employees, including teachers like Ms. McBride, are also likely to have pensions. The benefit institute found that 83 percent of state and local employees had access to a traditional defined-benefit plan in 2014.

There are also persuasive reasons to expect that “among that two-generation retirement population, you’re going to have a disproportionate share who are better-educated professionals,” said Sara Rix, a senior strategic policy adviser at the AARP Public Policy Institute, the internal think tank for the giant lobbying group for older people. Although people with advanced education rarely have the kind of physically demanding jobs that might spur early retirement, she said, education correlates with better health care. Their higher incomes may also enable this group to save enough to compensate for the lack of a pension.

Ethnic-based predictions are somewhat tricky. The Centers for Disease Control statistics show that whites have longer life expectancy than African-Americans. But African-American as well as Latino cultures “have expectations that, ‘We do not put our parents in a nursing home,’ ” thus the children are more likely to retire early to care for their elders, said Lori Simon-Rusinowitz, interim director of the Center on Aging at the University of Maryland.

The luckiest families, like the McBride-Fink clan, enjoy more quality time in their shared retirement.

Suzanne Marquard, now 64, spent four days in Chicago with her father, William A. Marquard, a former chief executive of the American Standard Companies, and other family members for her daughter’s graduation from the University of Chicago in 2006. If she had not taken an early retirement incentive package from Prudential Financial 18 months before, she might have squeezed in only a one-day trip, Ms. Marquard said. “It would have been stressful. I would have been thinking about the stuff I had to do.”

Mr. Marquard died four months later at age 86, and Ms. Marquard’s mother, Margaret, who been unable to travel to the graduation, died in 2010 at age 90.

If she had not already retired from her teaching job, Roberta Hunter, 68, could not have gone with her father, Earle Marke, 97, a retired market researcher, and her sister, Jane Marke, 64, a psychiatrist, on a memory lane visit to Mr. Marke’s hometown, Stamford, Conn., last fall. Too many of the places they wanted to see would not be available on weekends. (Her mother, Anne, 95, also a former teacher, was unable to travel.)

Despina Gakopoulos, a spokeswoman for Road Scholar, an educational tour group that aims at travelers 50 and older, said that staff members had noticed more parent-offspring groups but did not specifically track such demographics.

Often, however, the newfound time is spent on caretaking. In the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s newest annual Retirement Confidence Survey of 1,500 employees and retirees, nearly half said they had left the work force earlier than planned, and 18 percent of those cited caring for a family member as the reason.

Bette Smith, 99, a retired and widowed bookkeeper, was fairly independent until last fall, according to her son, Frederick, 71, a retired New York City data analyst. First he started doing more of her paperwork, and after Ms. Smith was hospitalized with a broken clavicle in November, the son stayed nearby in her Bronx co-op for more than a week.

Both generations may chafe at the extra togetherness. “She doesn’t want to be dependent,” Mr. Smith said of his mother. She telephones him twice as often as before the accident, but “she does so apologetically.”

The younger retirees may find caretaker responsibilities eating into what was supposed to be their leisure time. “Is that less time for your own kids and grandkids, if you’re spending resources on your parents?” Ms. Rix of AARP asked.

Lenore Singer-Weinbrom and her husband, Barry Weinbrom, never needed to cancel vacation plans because of emergencies with their parents, all four of whom were still alive when Mr. Weinbrom retired as a New York City schools science teacher in 2004 at age 58. However, the couple regularly bought trip insurance, because they worried “what happens if … ?” recalled Ms. Singer-Weinbrom, 64, who retired as a school psychologist in 2009.

(Mr. Weinbrom and all the older generation except his mother are now deceased.)

The pressures are less intense while the younger generation is still employed, because “work can offer an escape from the stress of caregiving and the stress of that family relationship,” said Professor Moen of the University of Minnesota.

Despite the hassles, the offspring say they are grateful that retirement has given them extra time with their parents.

If this phenomenon persists into future generations, it may happen at later ages, as baby boomers and their offspring delay retirement, many experts suggest. “By the time their children retire, we may have even more medical advances to help us live even longer,” Professor Moen said.