Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a weak elderly parent - and all the attendant need for physical and financial assistance - have jumped eightfold in just one generation.
After starting out high in children, the optimism bias hits rock bottom – the lowest possible level – in middle age, often because of work pressures, family responsibilities or caring for elderly parents.
Recently, I was working with a family, who elderly couple, the husband was bed-bound with severe memory deficits, and the elderly wife was his only caretaker.
After 19 years, they finally went back to the state of Jin, and the prince became the duke Jie Zitui decided to retire and lived with his elderly mother in the forest.
He gives advice on family finances, things like everything parents need to know about managing the costs of bringing up children, sending them to university, and actually, also, about care for elderly relatives.
Or we might — on our way to a station — exchange one or two sympathetic words with a taxi driver about their elderly mother who, we learn, has just gone into a care home after having a fall.