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“I don’t see myself as a caregiver.” I said this to my best friend last week.
She sighed (guffawed) at me the way only a best friend can, equal parts love and disbelief. And then she laid it out. The past year and a half. My mom’s cancer. The appointments. The calls and the research. The mental hum that runs at all times when someone you love is sick.
I shrugged my shoulder. “I don’t know. I just… I’m being a daughter. It’s what you do. I want this time with her.”
And I do. I want this time with her. Not because any of it is easy (it’s 100% brutiful - brutal and beautiful at all times), but because she is my mom, and I am her daughter, and somewhere inside the logistics and the appointments and the calls, there is a connection and closeness and a way of talking and communicating that is…special. That makes my heart ache in that brutiful way. I’ve had the chance to continue to learn her in a way that feels urgent and irreplaceable.
But as my best friend and I kept talking, I had to admit it: I am also, a caregiver. Not in the obligatory, this is all too much and I don’t want this kind of way (though if someone could please take the cancer out of our lives, that would be great-thanks). But in the I want to be here and show my love, but I’d be a hypocrite if I acted like all of this is easy kind of way. More than that, somehow, as a Millennial, I have found myself in the sandwich generation. The one I (and many of our generation) used to observe from the outside, the way you observe something you assume will eventually happen to someone else.
I’m not on the outside anymore.
How You Get Here
There is no universal arrival story. Some people slide in slowly, over years, as aging parents need more and lean harder. The asks are small at first. A ride to a doctor’s appointment. A phone call to help navigate a form. Help figuring out a prescription change. Then the calls come more often, and the asks get bigger, and one day you realize you’ve been doing this for so long that you’ve lost track of when it started.
Other people are walking along a perfectly ordinary Tuesday and life comes from behind and shoves them into the deep end without warning. A diagnosis. A fall. A phone call that resets the whole calendar.
There is no one-size-fits-all into how we get here. There is only: one day you’re on the outside looking in. And then you’re not.
What the Sandwich Generation Actually Looks Like Now
The term “sandwich generation” describes adults who are simultaneously raising children and caring for aging parents, squeezed from both sides, managing the needs of two generations while still trying to hold their own lives together.
According to a 2025 Allianz Life study, one in four Americans currently lives inside that sandwich, and nearly half of Millennials (46%) are part of this group. Not the baby boomers we looked up and assumed would carry this weight. Us. The generation still carrying student debt and navigating 40-something bodies and trying to figure out retirement while the goalpost keeps moving.
I’m in the sandwich generation, but here’s what makes my version of it feel particularly layered: my parents are in their 60s and 70s. And my 96-year-old grandmother is still here. My parents still take her to doctors’ appointments. Which means, in a very real sense, we are a four-generation stack. My kids, me, my parents, my grandmother. The sandwich is building its own sandwich.
Not everyone’s version looks the same. Some women are managing a parent who lives far away and requires long-distance coordination. Some are navigating a parent with cognitive decline. Some are doing this while working full-time, running a business, or recovering from their own health challenges. Some are doing it while a sibling sits on the sidelines and the weight falls entirely on one set of shoulders. The shape of it varies. The weight of it doesn’t.
How the Dual Role Plays Out in a Woman’s Life
We become the logistics coordinators. We become the emotional processors. We become the ones who remember the appointment and reschedule the appointment and find the specialist and research the facility and maybe make the call to the insurance company and explain the explanation of benefits and track the prescription changes. We do this while also managing the work deadline, the school schedules and the emotional lives of our own children who are growing up and evolving into their own independent selves and can also pick up on our stress.
What most don’t stop to consider is that while you’re in the sandwich generation, the role doesn’t stay the same size. It grows. It shifts. It deepens. What begins as helping with logistics can evolve into managing finances, then overseeing medical decisions, then coordinating care transitions. And while it’s evolving, your own needs, your sleep, your health, your relationships, your career trajectory, your retirement, are competing for time and resources you don’t have.
The Financial Reality Often Ignored
The financial impact of being in this position is real, documented, and significantly underestimated by the people living inside it.
According to New York Life’s Wealth Watch research, 95% of sandwich generation adults say caregiving has impacted their lives, and financial strain ranks at the top of the list. Over half have made a sacrifice to their own financial security to provide care. Forty-five percent have gone into credit card debt. A third have cut back on day-to-day expenses. A quarter have stopped contributing to their emergency savings entirely.
And then there’s retirement. The 2025 Allianz study found that 59% of sandwich generation members have reduced or stopped contributing to their retirement accounts because of the dual caregiving demands. Fifty-nine percent.
The gender gap inside this is particularly stark. New York Life found that 72% of men felt they could continue providing the same level of care financially for at least another year before needing to adjust. Only 54% of women said the same. Fourteen percent of women said they could sustain their current level of care for six months or less. Three percent of men said the same.
Women are doing more of the caregiving, feeling the financial strain more acutely, and have less runway to absorb it.
The Mental Health Cost Is Not Separate From the Financial Cost
A 2026 report from Cleo, a family care platform, assessed more than 19,000 working caregivers and found that 64% of working women in the sandwich generation are at a breaking point, experiencing escalating mental health strain at a rate that is threatening their health, their careers, and their capacity to keep doing what they’re doing.
In the first half of 2025, nearly half a million women left the US workforce. Caregiving pressures were a significant driver.
This is not a personal failure. It is a structural reality.
When you leave the workforce, even temporarily, to manage caregiving demands, the financial consequences compound. Career advancement stalls. Earnings drop. Social Security contributions pause. Retirement contributions stop. The professional network that took years to build gets quiet. And when you return, the gap on the resume needs to be explained.
The bone-deep exhaustion that caregivers describe, the kind that sleep can’t fix, is real. It shows up in the body. It shows up in decision-making. It shows up in the financial choices made under pressure, in the dark, when you’re depleted and running on obligation and love and the inability to ask for help. Those decisions deserve to be made with clear eyes and a full tank, and they rarely are.
So what does it look like to get ahead of even a little of it?
What Preparing Actually Looks Like
I work with clients who are navigating this in real time, and the ones who feel most grounded aren’t the ones who’ve solved it perfectly. They’re the ones who started somewhere.
It’s the client who opened a dedicated investment account, not a parent’s account, not a general savings account, but a separate bucket, and puts something in it every month so she knows how much she can contribute toward care over time. She doesn’t know exactly what she’ll need it for. She knows she’ll need it for something. The account is the commitment.
It’s setting aside money in your own retirement accounts, even when everything in you wants to redirect it. The oxygen mask still goes on first. Your 65-year-old self is going to need what your 43-year-old self saves. The parents you’re caring for right now didn’t skip their own retirement planning to take care of you when you were small. Try not to skip yours.
It’s having a conversation, with a partner, with a sibling, with your parents themselves, before the crisis that forces the conversation. What does Mom want? What does Dad want? What does their financial picture actually look like? Do they have long-term care coverage? Who is making decisions if they can’t? These are uncomfortable questions. They are significantly more uncomfortable when someone is in the hospital and they haven’t been asked yet.
It’s having your own support system in place. A therapist. A financial planner. A friend who will tell you the truth and listen without judgment at 10pm. A sibling who will show up when they say they will. Someone who will ask how you are doing, not just how the logistics are going.
What the Statistics Miss
I had coffee with a new acquaintance recently. We talked about our respective roles in caregiving for our families. And we both said the same thing: we want to be in the roles we’re in.
The research gives us clarity. An understanding. Something that feels like command or control over a situation where we can’t control what our loved ones are actually experiencing. We become the translators. The question-askers. The ones who read the studies so we know what we’re walking into.
That’s the part nobody puts in the statistics. The caregiving season, as hard as it is, can also contain something that doesn’t fit neatly into the burnout data or the retirement contribution gap. Connection that lives right alongside the exhaustion. Love that is completely tangled up with grief and logistics and showing up at the doctor’s office and not knowing what comes next.
If you’re in this season too, I think you already know exactly what I mean.
Related: Behind Every Serious Business Is a Woman Doing Unsexy Work