The Sandwich Generation: Caring for Aging Parents While Raising a Family of Your Own
There is a period in many people’s lives, typically in their forties and early fifties, when the demands of caregiving converge from two directions simultaneously. Children are still at home and still requiring significant attention, energy, and advocacy. And parents, who were until recently fully independent, have begun to need something: more frequent phone calls, help navigating medical appointments, conversations about driving or living arrangements, or in more acute situations, daily hands-on care. The people caught between these two generations of need are sometimes called the sandwich generation, and the particular exhaustion of their position is frequently underestimated, both by the people around them and by themselves. As a therapist in Hidden Hills and Calabasas who has worked with individuals and families through the full span of adult development for over forty years, this is a season of life I know well and one that genuinely benefits from support.
The Invisible Weight of This Season
One of the most consistent things I hear from people in this position is some version of the same statement: I should be able to handle this. They are adults. They are capable. They have managed difficult things before. And they are correct. They are also frequently running at a level of sustained demand that leaves very little margin for anything that is not essential, including their own wellbeing, their partnership, or even the most basic acts of self-care and rest.
What makes the sandwich generation’s burden particularly invisible is that each individual demand, taken alone, is manageable. It is the convergence that produces the strain: the child’s school issue that arrives in the same week as the parent’s medical diagnosis that arrives in the same week as the work deadline that was already tight. And because none of these things is individually catastrophic, the person often does not give themselves permission to acknowledge how depleted they actually are. They keep going. They manage. And the depletion accumulates quietly, out of sight, until it begins to surface as anxiety, depression, irritability, or a physical breakdown that finally demands attention.
The Grief That Nobody Names
Caring for aging parents involves a grief that is often unacknowledged because the parent is still alive. And yet the losses are real: the loss of the parent as they used to be, the reversal of the dependency relationship, the confrontation with mortality that comes from watching your parents become fragile. For adult children who had complicated relationships with their parents, this season can also stir unresolved material: old hurts that were never addressed, resentments that are now overlaid with guilt, the difficulty of caring generously for someone who did not always care well for you.
This grief deserves its own space. It tends not to get one, because the practical demands of caregiving are so immediate and the cultural expectation is that adult children simply handle their aging parents as a matter of course. Therapy provides a place to feel what is actually present in this experience: the love and the frustration and the grief and the fear, without having to resolve or perform any of it.
The Effect on the Partnership
Caregiving stress does not stay contained within the caregiving relationship. It migrates into the partnership, typically in the form of reduced availability, increased irritability, and the particular tension that arises when two people are both depleted and neither has the reserves to be generous with the other. Partners who are not directly involved in the caregiving sometimes feel sidelined or resentful of the energy going to parents. Partners who are involved may feel the asymmetry of effort differently and develop their own grievances about fairness and support.
Addressing the partnership explicitly during this season, rather than assuming it can simply sustain itself, is one of the most practical protective measures available. Couples who find time to genuinely connect, who can talk honestly about what each is carrying, and who can ask for and offer specific support tend to weather this season without the kind of relational damage that, left unaddressed, can take years to repair once the acute caregiving demands have passed.
Permission to Have Limits
One of the most useful things I offer clients navigating this season is something surprisingly simple: permission. Permission to not be everything to everyone. Permission to have genuine limits around how much care they can provide and to communicate those limits without guilt. Permission to grieve what is being lost even while managing what is being demanded. And permission to seek support for themselves, not only for their parents or their children, but for the person in the middle who is holding everything together and who deserves care as much as anyone in their orbit.
Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with over forty years of experience providing therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, and across the Greater Los Angeles area, in person and via secure telehealth for California residents.
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Susie Cole Rome, MA, LMFT, offers compassionate therapy for individuals, couples, and families in Hidden Hills, Calabasas, Woodland Hills, Malibu, Agoura Hills, and throughout the Greater Los Angeles area, with secure telehealth available for all California residents.
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