Caring for Aging Parents While Working Full Time — Why America’s Sandwich Generation Is Burning Out
Tuesday, November 11, 2025.
Her father texts during her Zoom meeting:
“Can you bring soup?”
She hits the thumbs-up emoji, mutes herself, and keeps nodding through a conversation about “quarterly outcomes.”
By the time the call ends, she’s got three browser tabs open—one for DoorDash, one for her daughter’s FAFSA, and one titled “How to talk to aging parents about independence.”
That’s what burnout looks like for America’s Sandwich Generation: love divided by logistics.
It’s the unpaid, unending role of caring for aging parents while still raising, funding, or worrying about your own kids. It’s devotion that’s begun to taste like debt.
The Shape of the Strain
The latest AARP/National Alliance for Caregiving report puts the number of American family caregivers at roughly 63 million—almost one in four adults.
The average caregiver is 49, often employed full-time, and already short on sleep.
The CDC finds that nearly one in four report anxiety or depression, and over half live with chronic stress. The job is invisible but relentless: tracking meds, juggling appointments, managing guilt.
Caregiving is no longer a short chapter in middle age—it’s a second career with no pay, no benefits, and no retirement plan.
And where you live matters. AARP’s state-by-state breakdown shows massive differences in financial strain and respite options. Burnout, in other words, is often policy by ZIP code.
Sociologist Peggy Thoits called it role strain: when the plates you’re spinning start colliding. You can be a loving child, a competent professional, or a halfway present parent—but not all three at the same time.
The American Psychological Association’s Stress in America report confirms what every caregiver already knows: most feel they “never have enough time for themselves.” 45% report that their relationships are suffering. The APA calls it a “national empathy drain.”
Every statistic is another bowl of soup going cold.
Parenting Your Parents
It starts small—a quick errand, a ride to the doctor. Then you’re sorting the mail, managing their medications, explaining why “that nice young man on the phone” isn’t from Medicare.
Somewhere along the way, you become the parent.
Care researchers call it role reversal. Therapists call it boundary collapse. You might call it just another Tuesday.
One caregiver told the Journal of Gerontological Nursing, “You lose the edges of your own life.”
There’s love, and there’s fatigue. And then there’s the uneasy middle where both live side by side.
One especially overlooked group—military and veteran caregivers—shows how deep the costs go.
Their unpaid work is valued between $119 billion and $485 billion a year, while individual caregivers absorb an average of $8,500 in out-of-pocket expenses and lose around $4,500 in wages annually (RAND Corporation, 2024). It’s not just emotional burnout—it’s economic erosion.
When Love Ages Like Milk
Compassion fatigue isn’t weakness; it’s biology.
Chronic stress elevates cortisol, weakens immunity, and accelerates aging. In one Gerontologist study, caregivers logging more than 20 hours a week of unpaid care showed shorter telomeres—a marker of cellular aging (Fredman et al., 2010).
Newer evidence from JAMA Network Open adds a chilling twist: stress over housing instability in caregiving households doesn’t just affect adults—it increases the risk of depression in their children. Burnout, it turns out, is contagious.
As one of my clients, Nadine quipped, “Love ages like milk when you never get to rest.”
When Care Actually Helps
Not all care corrodes. Sometimes it heals both sides.
Studies by Merril Silverstein and Vern Bengtson show that intergenerational care can strengthen family solidarity—if both sides feel it’s voluntary and appreciated.
Psychologist Victor Cicirelli found that caregivers motivated by affection rather than obligation experience less depression and more meaning.
A 2024 Innovation in Aging analysis added nuance: when relationships remain warm, the same number of care hours produces less burnout. Solidarity, apparently, is analgesic.
So if you’re bringing soup out of affection, it’s nourishment.
If you’re bringing it out of duty, it’s labor. The pot’s the same; the chemistry’s different.
Four Ground Rules for Staying Human
1. Guard Your Hours.
Time boundaries save families. “I can visit on Tuesdays and Saturdays” beats “Call me whenever.” Guilt thrives on vagueness; clarity sets everyone free.
2. Redefine Guilt.
Rest isn’t selfish. The Mayo Clinic calls self-care preventive medicine. Every rested hour is a longer runway for compassion.
3. Protect Your Partnership.
Marital satisfaction drops sharply during caregiving years (Revenson et al., 2016). Talk about the cost—not just money, but time and attention. Text your spouse about dinner, not prescriptions.
4. Plan the Goodbye Early.
Don’t wait for a crisis to talk about end-of-life wishes. Tools like Five Wishes make it easier to turn avoidance into relief. It’s not morbid; it’s merciful.
What Works: Real Interventions
The best programs aren’t inspirational—they’re useful.
Digital versions of the REACH II caregiver-support model now have randomized-trial evidence of reducing stress and improving health (Elliott et al., 2010; Stevens et al., 2025).
They’re free, flexible, and fit inside a caregiver’s Tuesday—which is the real test of any intervention.
If you’re building a resource list, start there. Empathy helps; structure saves.
The Global Comparison We Never Make
In much of Europe, elder care is treated as social infrastructure.
The Netherlands provides universal home-care funding; Sweden offers paid caregiver leave. Burnout rates drop by nearly 40% in systems that treat aging as a shared cost (OECD, 2023).
Here, we call it “family values” and hand you a 50 year mortgage.
Our safety net has become a web of daughters, daughters-in-law, and exhausted sons. We’ve privatized compassion and turned love into the last functioning welfare program.
FAQ
How do I prevent burnout?
You don’t prevent it—you pace it. Use respite services from the Family Caregiver Alliance, rotate duties, and schedule your own doctor before scheduling theirs.
What if my parent refuses help?
Appeal to their pride: “You taught me to take responsibility. Hiring help lets me do that right.”
Is anger normal?
Yes. Anger is grief in work boots. It shows up when love runs out of language.
How do I keep my marriage alive?
Protect tiny rituals. Ten minutes on the porch counts. So does laughing about the absurdity of it all.
Final Thoughts: A Civic Religion of Care
Every generation teaches relevant cultural survival.
The Depression generation taught us thrift. Boomers taught us ambition. The Sandwich Generation is teaching unsustainable devotion—how to care without rest, fund without support, and endure without complaint.
Caregiving has become America’s invisible infrastructure: unpaid, uncounted, indispensable.
It’s what holds the line between policy failure and human decency.
When you drive across town with soup in the passenger seat, you’re not just feeding your father—you’re keeping the country from collapsing. You are the quiet safety net no one budgeted for.
Care is how private citizens keep public trust alive.
Every ride to the doctor, every midnight pill count, every spreadsheet of medical bills is a vote of confidence in civilization itself.
If trust is our civic religion, caregivers are its clergy.
And even clergy deserve a sabbatical.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving. (2025, July 24). Caregiving in the U.S. 2025. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/ltss/family-caregiving/caregiving-in-the-us-2025/
AARP & National Alliance for Caregiving. (2025, October 28). Caregiving in the U.S. 2025: Caring across states. https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/ltss/family-caregiving/caregiving-in-the-us-2025-caring-across-states/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023, November 15). Family caregivers: The impact of care. https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/family-caregivers.html
Cicirelli, V. G. (2000). Relationship of affect and attachment to parental caregiving. Psychology and Aging, 15(4), 611–621. https://doi.org/10.1037/0882-7974.15.4.611
Elliott, A. F., Burgio, L. D., & Decoster, J. (2010). Enhancing caregiver health: Findings from REACH II. Clinical Interventions in Aging, 5, 109–119. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2819276/
Fredman, L., Cauley, J. A., Hochberg, M., Ensrud, K. E., & Doros, G. (2010). Mortality associated with caregiving, general stress, and caregiving strain. The Gerontologist, 50(5), 661–671. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnq060
Hanson, J. L., et al. (2025). Stress about eviction or loss of housing and child mental health. JAMA Network Open, 8(3), e2xxxx. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2830114
Joblin, C., et al. (2024). Negative relationship quality and burnout in sandwich generation caregivers. Innovation in Aging, 8(Suppl 1), 974. https://academic.oup.com/innovateage/article/8/Supplement_1/974/7938601
Mayo Clinic. (2024, April 12). Caregiver stress: Tips for taking care of yourself. https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/caregiver-stress/art-20044784
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2023). Elderly population (indicator). https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/elderly-population_20758480-table7
RAND Corporation. (2024, September 24). America’s military and veteran caregivers: Hidden heroes. https://www.rand.org/news/press/2024/09/24.html
Revenson, T. A., Kayser, K., & Bodenmann, G. (2016). Couples coping with stress: Emerging perspectives on dyadic coping. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000204
Silverstein, M., & Bengtson, V. L. (1997). Intergenerational solidarity and the structure of adult child–parent relationships in American families. American Journal of Sociology, 103(2), 429–460. https://doi.org/10.2307/353687
Stevens, A. B., et al. (2025). A randomized trial of two online platforms for dementia family caregivers (REACH-based). JMIR Aging, 8(2), eXXXXX. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12519501/
Thoits, P. A. (1991). On merging identity theory and stress research. Social Psychology Quarterly, 54(2), 101–112. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786929