Caring for Ageing Parents While Raising Children

The quiet grief of being needed in two directions

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being needed in two directions at once.

You may be raising children, supporting teenagers, helping young adults find their footing, or trying to stay emotionally available to a family that still needs you in active, daily ways. At the same time, your parents may be ageing, becoming frailer, living with illness, needing more practical help, or beginning to change in ways that are hard to name. You might find yourself moving between school runs, hospital appointments, work, phone calls, medication lists, family group chat messages, and the quiet fear that something is slowly shifting and will not shift back.

This is sometimes called being part of the sandwich generation - adults caring for ageing parents while also raising children or supporting younger family members. The phrase is useful, and official UK data has increasingly recognised this group of carers, but it can also sound too neat for something that often feels emotionally complex, exhausting, and difficult to explain. The Office for National Statistics reported that around 1.4 million people in the UK were sandwich carers between January 2021 and May 2023, highlighting how common this experience has become (Office for National Statistics, 2024).

Being in the sandwich generation is not only about being busy. It is about being pulled between generations, between past and future, between the people who once cared for you and the people you are now responsible for caring for. Dementia UK describes sandwich carers as people who are caring for an older or disabled relative while also caring for children or younger family members, and this description captures the practical reality, though not always the emotional weight beneath it (Dementia UK, n.d.).

For many people, this stage of life brings a form of grief that is easy to overlook.

The quiet grief of ageing parents

Your parent may still be alive, still speaking, still recognisable in many ways, and yet something may already feel altered. Perhaps they are less independent than they once were. Perhaps illness has changed their personality, memory, mobility, or confidence. Perhaps you have become the person who notices symptoms, makes phone calls, holds information, or quietly anticipates the next difficulty. There may be no single dramatic event, but a gradual accumulation of small losses: the parent who no longer drives, the mother who cannot manage the stairs, the father who repeats himself, the family home that no longer feels stable, the future that feels less open than it used to.

This can be anticipatory grief - grief that begins before death. It often arrives when someone we love is seriously ill, ageing, living with dementia, or changing in ways that suggest an ending is somewhere ahead, even if we do not know when. Clinical writing on anticipatory mourning has long recognised that grief can begin before a death, especially when illness changes both the person and the relationship (Rando, 2000). Research into dementia caregiving also shows that family carers may experience grief before death as they respond to gradual losses in memory, personality, shared life, and future expectation (Marwit and Meuser, 2002; Singer et al., 2022).

Anticipatory grief can be confusing because the person is still here. You may feel sadness, frustration, guilt, tenderness, anxiety, resentment, or even moments of relief, sometimes all in the same day. You may wonder whether you are “allowed” to grieve when nothing final has happened yet. But grief does not always wait for death. Sometimes it begins when the relationship changes, when roles reverse, or when we realise that the version of our parent we once relied on is no longer fully available.

Being needed by children and parents at the same time

At the same time, your children may be looking to you for steadiness. They may need lifts, meals, attention, emotional availability, guidance, reassurance, money, and patience. Their lives may be expanding just as your parents’ lives are contracting. One generation is moving outward, towards independence and possibility; the other may be moving inward, towards dependence and limitation. Standing between those movements can be disorienting. You may feel proud of your children and frightened for your parents. You may celebrate one milestone while privately worrying about a scan result, a fall, a diagnosis, or a conversation you know is coming.

It can be particularly hard when no one else sees the full picture. At work, you may appear capable and composed. With your children, you may try not to burden them. With your parents, you may avoid showing how worried you are. With siblings, if you have them, there may be disagreement about what is needed, who is doing enough, or how serious things really are. You may become the person who holds everything together while also feeling increasingly alone inside it.

The pressure of sandwich caring is not only emotional. It can also affect work, finances, health, relationships and identity. ONS data notes that sandwich carers may experience impacts on employment and wellbeing, particularly when caring responsibilities are intensive (Office for National Statistics, 2024). This matters because exhaustion is not simply a private failure to cope; it is often a response to carrying more than one person can easily hold alone.

Family dynamics and old roles

Family dynamics often become sharper at this stage. Old patterns can return with surprising force. A parent’s illness or ageing can awaken earlier roles: the responsible one, the distant one, the peacekeeper, the child who was expected to cope, the sibling who stayed close, the one who moved away. Practical decisions about care, money, housing, medical appointments, or end-of-life wishes can carry emotional histories beneath them. It may look like an argument about who takes someone to the hospital, but underneath it may be years of resentment, loyalty, guilt, or longing.

Caring for ageing parents rarely happens in a neutral space. It happens inside families, and families have memories.

There can also be a quieter grief around identity. You may not feel old, and yet your parents’ ageing confronts you with time passing. Their vulnerability may bring your own mortality closer. You may look at your children and remember being their age. You may look at your parents and realise that you are now occupying the middle of the family line. This can bring tenderness, but also a strange kind of vertigo. The people who once represented safety, authority, or permanence may now need you in ways that reverse the emotional order of things.

When the relationship with your parent is complicated

For those who had difficult relationships with their parents, this stage can be especially complicated. Caring does not always come with simplicity or warmth. You may feel duty without closeness, concern mixed with anger, grief mixed with old hurt. A parent’s decline can stir up the pain of what was missing, not only the fear of what is being lost. Some people grieve the parent they are losing; others grieve the parent they never quite had. Many grieve both.

Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss is helpful here. Ambiguous loss describes forms of loss that are unclear, unresolved, or difficult to publicly recognise. A person may be physically present but psychologically or emotionally changed, as can happen in dementia, serious illness, addiction, estrangement, or other forms of relational absence (Boss, 1999; Family Caregiver Alliance, 2021).

This kind of grief can be hard to speak about, because culturally we often expect illness or ageing to soften everything into forgiveness. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does not. More often, it reveals the full complexity of love, obligation, disappointment, and care.

Parenting while caring

If you are also raising children, you may notice that parenting becomes more emotionally charged. Your child’s needs may remind you of your own childhood. You may find yourself wanting to parent differently while feeling depleted by caring responsibilities elsewhere. You may feel guilty for being distracted, impatient, or less present than you want to be. You may also feel protective of your children, unsure how much to tell them about a grandparent’s illness or decline.

These are not easy decisions. Children often sense more than adults realise, but they also need information that is honest, age-appropriate, and held with care. There may be no perfect script. Sometimes what matters most is not finding the exact right words, but creating an atmosphere where questions are allowed, feelings are not shamed, and the family does not have to pretend that nothing is changing.

How grief counselling can help

In counselling, people in this stage of life often speak about exhaustion first. They may say they are overwhelmed, stretched thin, irritable, or unable to concentrate. But beneath the exhaustion, there is often grief, fear, and the strain of carrying too much without enough space to feel it. Therapy can offer a place where you do not have to be the organiser, the strong one, the reliable one, or the person who keeps everyone else steady. It can be a space to speak honestly about love and resentment, duty and anger, sadness and relief, without needing to make those feelings more acceptable than they are.

Counselling cannot remove the practical realities of caring for ageing parents while raising children. It cannot make illness fair, give families perfect communication, or stop time from moving. But it can help you understand what this stage is asking of you, where your limits are, what old patterns may be resurfacing, and how to stay connected to yourself while being needed by others. Sometimes the work is about making decisions. Sometimes it is about grieving what is changing. Sometimes it is simply about having one place where the full complexity can be held.

If you are caring for ageing parents while raising children, you may not describe yourself as grieving. You may just feel tired, short-tempered, guilty, or quietly frightened. But grief is often present in these in-between places, before the funeral, before the final goodbye, before anyone else recognises that something has already been lost.

You are allowed to need support before everything falls apart. You are allowed to feel more than one thing at once. You are allowed to love your family and feel burdened by them. You are allowed to grieve slowly, privately, and imperfectly.

If this resonates, grief counselling can offer a steady space to explore what is changing and how you are carrying it. I offer counselling for adults in Bath and online across the UK, with a particular focus on grief, anticipatory grief, illness, family dynamics, and life transitions.

References and further reading/listening:

Boss, P. (1999) Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dementia UK (n.d.) What is a sandwich carer? Available at: https://www.dementiauk.org/information-and-support/looking-after-yourself-as-a-carer/what-is-a-sandwich-carer/ (Accessed: 1 May 2026).

Family Caregiver Alliance (2021) Caregiving and Ambiguous Loss. Written by Pauline Boss. Available at: https://www.caregiver.org/resource/caregiving-and-ambiguous-loss/ (Accessed: 1 May 2026).

Gawande, A. (2014) Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End. London: Profile Books.

Lloyd, C. (2016–present) Griefcast. [Podcast]. Available at: https://cariadlloyd.com/griefcast (Accessed: 1 May 2026).

Marwit, S.J. and Meuser, T.M. (2002) ‘Development and initial validation of an inventory to assess grief in caregivers of persons with Alzheimer’s disease’, The Gerontologist, 42(6), pp. 751–765.

Office for National Statistics (2024) Sandwich carers, UK: January 2021 to May 2023. Released 6 November 2024. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/socialcare/bulletins/sandwichcarersuk/january2021tomay2023 (Accessed: 1 May 2026).

Ostaseski, F. (2017) The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully. New York: Flatiron Books.

Rando, T.A. (2000) Clinical Dimensions of Anticipatory Mourning: Theory and Practice in Working with the Dying, Their Loved Ones, and Their Caregivers. Champaign, IL: Research Press.

Singer, J., Papa, A. and Shear, M.K. (2022) ‘Assessment of anticipatory grief in informal caregivers of dependants with dementia: a systematic review’, Aging & Mental Health, 26(7), pp. 1307–1317.

Cooper, A. (2022–present) All There Is with Anderson Cooper. [Podcast]. CNN Audio. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/all-there-is-with-anderson-cooper (Accessed: 1 May 2026).