I'm one of the sandwich generation, except that in our case, it's a one-sided sandwich because we have elderly parents we're taking care of but no children.  We have had to help our nieces and nephews a lot, though.  One of our nieces is a single mother with a six year old and they lived with us when she first had him until she was able to get on her feet. 

My husband is 54 and loves his job as a professor of Astronomy.  He may never retire!  I've found that dedicated astronomers rarely do.  They can't stop looking for the answers and the questions keep on coming!  I, on the other hand, consider myself semi-retired already because I work part-time at a job I like and manage all the money.  When I went from full-time to part-time due to health problems, I started to become aware of our vast ignorance of all things financial around 10 years ago and started reading like crazy to make up for lost time.  I taught myself enough about personal finance to at least fix our retirement asset allocation, start prepaying our mortgage (and refinanced to a much lower rate and a shorter term, 15-years), things like that.  We were always very cautious and never got into credit card debt but we were clueless (and very disinterested) in financial matters.   I finally realized that one of us had to get interested and start making decisions before it was too late.  We started late as it was.  Now we are debt-free except for the mortgage, which is going down, but not fast enough for my taste.  I can't wait to be TOTALLY debt-free!  

I am trying to teach the next generation to wise-up at a younger age so they don't have to play catch-up like we have.  Some listen, some don't.  At least they are exposed to it.  We have learned a lot from our parents' mistakes. 

If it helps any- I too am a sandwhich generation person.  My mother is in her 70's and I have teenagers.  I also have an additional sandwhich- my only other sibling who is in her late 40's is disabled with muscular dystrophy.  I would say that this is actually maybe what caused me to reach what I termed in another post as the age of realization at 34 1/2.  I'm now almost 38 and hope to be without student loans, credit card debt, unsecured loans, and medical debt in another 2 years.  That still leaves 2 house loans- (2 houses- long story) and 2 car loans however we are plugging away.  I'm glad I'm going through this when I'm in my mid-late 30's to early 40's.  Its not easy however becoming an informed financial individual is something that is important.  I understand what happened to get us into this problem.  Neither of our parents had money so when we started making money they couldn't give us unwanted but needed parental advice.  Ultimately in 9 years we should have both houses paid for (both were short term home loans- one was 15 years and one was 10 years.  We have 9 years left on both of them.  That is assuming we don't get a situation to sell either.  The current car loans will be paid off in 3 years and 4 years naturally.  One goal I hope to achieve with car loans is to never again have 2 of them at the same time.   The other rule we have is to not get credit cards ever again!  We have paid them off 3 times.  Third time is the charm. 

I'm glad to know that John and I aren't the only couple who were financially clueless! As for the next generation, our kids are a lot smarter about money than we ever were. We did teach them to save and so forth all the while getting ourselves further in the hole but they have grown up much more money savy than their hapless parents. Go figure.