The Sandwich Generation: Caring for Aging Parents While Raising Children (and Yourself)
Published
Written by Rose Chahla, LPCC
No one week in the life of a caregiver ever looks the same. The kids' school recital and your mom's cardiology appointment fall on the same day. It's your turn to provide class snacks the same week you meant to tour nursing homes for your dad. Your five-year-old asks why you seem sad and why you never want to play anymore. None of this, on its own, is a crisis. There's no single event to point to, no emergency to account for all of the exhaustion - just the steady accumulation of responsibilities, decisions, and emotional labor that slowly stretches a person thinner than they ever imagined. It can feel like carrying the weight of multiple lives at once.
This is the emotional and logistical reality of millions in the sandwich generation: adults raising children while caring for aging parents, usually while also working full-time and trying to maintain their marriage, friendships, and some version of themselves that isn't defined entirely by the next demand on their attention. Complex caregiving isn't new, but it has become increasingly common as people are having children later and parents are living longer with increasingly complex needs.
These caregivers often feel behind, exhausted, and unable to give their best to anyone or anything - including themselves. The exhaustion that follows often isn't resolved with a good night's sleep. This is what happens to a nervous system that has to stay alert to the next demand indefinitely, with no clear end date. Over time, many caregivers become so practiced at anticipating everyone else's needs that they lose touch with their own.
When the Parent You're Caring For Wasn't Safe
To further complicate caregiving, not every aging parent was a safe parent. Some of the people I work with are caring for a mother or father who neglected them, frightened them, or abused them as children. Maybe there was hope that this parent would eventually offer some healing words or closure for old wounds. Instead, there is more emotional strain and, sometimes, a deep-seated resentment. Caregiving, in those cases, can reopen and compound anger, guilt, and grief for the parent someone never had - alongside a real, present-tense sense of obligation and care for the parent now sitting in front of them. Old dynamics and old wounds often resurface at the very moment that relationship is asking the most of us.
A Grief With No Clear Start Date
Complex caregiving often involves more than one kind of grief. There may be anticipatory grief as a parent's health declines, ambiguous grief as the person you knew slowly changes while still being physically present, and, for some, grief for the relationship they never had. We may grieve a parent as they change and mourn the life they can no longer live - all while that parent is still alive and still, in some form, present.
Alongside this runs another layer of grief that gets even less airtime: the gradual loss of a person's own sense of presence with themselves and grief over the loss of time, freedom, and the version of themselves that existed before caregiving became central to their life. We may also feel guilt about not doing enough, wanting that freedom, or resenting a responsibility no one chose.
Where Therapy Fits
When so much of your life revolves around caring for everyone else, therapy can be a place where someone is finally caring for you. Caregivers are usually the first ones to take themselves off their own list: I don't have time. Maybe once things calm down. Everyone else needs me first. I understand it - caregiving rarely negotiates its own timeline, and therapy can look like one more obligation stacked onto a schedule that's already full. But what doesn't get processed doesn't disappear. It gets carried somewhere else - in the shoulders, in the short temper, in a low, constant hum of dread that has nowhere to go.
What I try to offer isn't another task, but a space where nothing is being asked of the person in return: room to hold overwhelming emotions without being told they're irrational or offered quick fixes; to admit to anger that feels shameful to say out loud; to sit with a grief that has no clean beginning or end, with someone who isn't asking them to pick a side in their own family.
It won't erase the exhaustion of holding all of this. But it can mean carrying it alongside someone, instead of alone.
Written by Rose Chahla, LPCC | Published July 2026 | Last updated July 2026
Rose Chahla is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) providing online therapy to adults throughout California. If you're navigating the demands of caring for aging parents, raising children, or both at once as many in the sandwich generation do, I invite you to reach out to learn more about working together.