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Grandparents Caught in the Middle: Caregiving Between Generations
Ahead of Grandparents Day, many older adults are balancing aging family members and grandkids — and finding ways to bring both generations together
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Key takeaways
- An estimated 28 percent of grandparents under 50 are simultaneously caring for grandchildren and an older adult, creating a uniquely demanding multigenerational caregiving role.
- With creativity and planning, grandparents can explore ways to care for older loved ones while keeping younger generations connected.
- Senior care services, adaptable work schedules and support networks can help caregivers remain involved without trying to juggle everything themselves.
The growing number of grandparents providing care on multiple fronts reflects a broader shift in how families are absorbing the nation’s care needs. Longer life expectancy and later childbearing mean more families have three or more generations needing care at the same time. Increasingly, grandparents are caught in the middle, caring for grandchildren while also helping aging parents — a situation known as the “club sandwich generation.”
“It’s looking more like a multilayered sandwich at this point,” says Nicole Jorwic, chief program officer at Caring Across Generations. Jorwic has seen the dynamic in her own family, where her mother has cared for an aging parent and grandchildren.
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AARP Research has explored how caregiving can stretch across generations. According to an online survey of approximately 3,300 U.S. grandparents, 7 percent are simultaneously caring for an adult and providing care to grandchildren at least monthly, a figure that rises to 28 percent among grandparents under 50. “We’re seeing a multigenerational infrastructure quietly growing where individuals are not only grandparents, but they’re also caring for an aging parent and grandchildren, and they’re torn between those two worlds,” says Indira Venkat, senior vice president of AARP Research.
The report also identified racial and ethnic differences in multigenerational caregiving. Eleven percent of Hispanic grandparents are simultaneously caring for an adult and providing care for grandchildren, compared with 9 percent of Black and Asian American/Pacific Islander grandparents and 5 percent of White grandparents.
For some grandparents, caring for grandchildren goes well beyond occasional babysitting. They may provide regular childcare that allows their adult children to work while also helping an aging parent with transportation, medical appointments, household tasks or personal care. “Grandparents filling in the gaps is the only option for a lot of families,” Jorwic says.
That responsibility can come at a significant personal and financial cost. Caregiving can lead grandparents to reduce their work hours or retire earlier than planned, potentially affecting their long-term financial security. Nine in 10 grandparents provide financial support for grandchildren, contributing an average of $2,654 annually, according to the AARP survey.
Caring for the young and old
Coloring across generations: Great-grandmother, Dorothy DeMoss, colors with her great-granddaughter at home.
Courtesy Debbie Compton
Debbie DeMoss Compton knows firsthand what it means to be caught between generations. While she was taking care of her mom, Dorothy, with dementia in her home in Oklahoma City, she had seven grandchildren at the time, including young children she regularly picked up from school.
Rather than allowing caregiving to pull the generations apart, Compton looked for ways to bring them together while protecting her mom from becoming overwhelmed. Compton created one-of-a-kind coloring books with larger, basic illustrations of animals that her mom and the grandkids enjoyed.
“Mom didn’t want to color in a little kid coloring book. So without anything else available, I created several coloring books that I knew would entertain her and the grands,” says Compton, who wrote a dozen more books, including the best-selling series, The Caregiver’s Advocate.
The goal wasn’t simply to keep everyone occupied. Compton wanted the generations to share an experience — one where they could be creative, laugh and enjoy one another.
When her mom eventually moved to a nearby memory care facility, Compton continued bringing the grandchildren to visit. She prepared them beforehand, explaining that they needed to be quiet and calm, and often took them directly to her mom’s room. The coloring books came along, too, giving the children and their great-grandmother a familiar activity they could share.
Staying connected through the generations
Julie Wilkerson, 64, has found a way to make her role in the “club” work for three generations of her family. Her 87-year-old mother, Gail, lives about an hour away in an independent-living senior community, while Wilkerson’s two young grandsons, Hal, 6, and Sam, 4, live nearby. Wilkerson works full-time as the director of a local arts agency, but her flexible schedule has allowed her to designate Mondays as her day for both caregiving and grandparenting.
Every Monday, Wilkerson checks on her mother, manages her medications and tackles what she calls “the list” of to-dos. She then picks up her grandsons, often bringing them to their great-grandmother’s apartment. The arrangement allows Wilkerson to accomplish practical tasks for her mother while giving her regular time with her grandsons.
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Gail’s apartment has become a place where the boys enjoy spending time. They play with toys their great-grandmother keeps for them. Wilkerson also brings her mother along to their activities, including Hal’s T-ball games, birthday parties and other family events. “I get to see my grandchildren, she gets to see her great-grandchildren — and you don’t have to choose one or the other,” Wilkerson says.
Wilkerson says her mother’s move to independent living has also eased some of the worry that came with having her living by herself. The facility provides additional oversight, including checking on residents if they don’t trigger a bathroom motion detector by a certain time. Julie still texts her mother daily or talks with her by phone, but she no longer feels she has to monitor her constantly.
For Ranjani Iyengar, 66, the demands of caring for an aging mother while being an involved grandmother have required a different kind of balancing act. Iyengar lives in Chicago and is a backup caregiver for her three young grandsons while also caring for her mother, who has chronic kidney problems and congestive heart failure.
When Iyengar’s oldest grandson was born in Seattle during the COVID-19 pandemic, she made about 20 trips to help care for him. At the same time, her mother was living with her and was hospitalized five times between January and August of 2021. Iyengar would turn to her husband, two other children and her mom’s cousin for support in many situations. “It literally took a village for us to get through those years,” Iyengar says.
Ranjani’s caregiving responsibilities became more complicated when her 90-year-old mother moved back to India in 2025 to spend the rest of her life in the home she had shared with her deceased husband. Because Ranjani had been her mother’s primary caregiver for years, she has traveled to India three times in six months to help when her mother’s health has worsened, stepping in when her brother, who splits his time between India and the U.S., needs backup.
Lessons learned from the club sandwich generation
Caring for two generations at once can be complicated, unpredictable and exhausting. But it can also bring unexpected rewards. Compton, Wilkerson and Iyengar have each found ways to navigate the competing demands of aging parents and grandchildren. Their experiences point to several lessons for other grandparents caught in the middle.
1. Bring generations together. Compton and Wilkerson learned that caring for their mothers and spending time with their grandchildren don’t necessarily have to be separate obligations. Rather than viewing them as competing responsibilities, they found ways to unite the generations and make the time more meaningful for everyone. Wilkerson often brings her grandsons to visit their great-grandmother or takes her mother along to their activities. For Compton, that meant creating coloring books that her mother and grandchildren could enjoy together.
2. Use the resources available to you. Grandparents don’t have to shoulder every responsibility themselves. Iyengar discovered that the state of Illinois offered an elder-care program that provided four hours a day of in-home assistance for her mother, giving Iyengar time to work and helping her mother maintain some independence. She also relied on her husband, children, extended family, friends and neighbors when she needed additional help. “Rely on your community, ask your friends for help, ask your neighbors for help,” Iyengar says. “I think that was my key to survival.”
3. Set boundaries and don’t feel guilty about it. Being a dependable grandparent doesn’t mean saying yes every time you’re asked to help. Iyengar serves as a backup caregiver for her grandsons when they are sick, school or day care is closed, or their parents need help for business travel. But she has learned to recognize her limits. “I’ve learned to hold my boundaries,” she says. “When I can’t, I say no.” She acknowledges that saying no can be difficult, particularly when grandchildren need help, but prioritizing every request over your own needs can eventually lead to exhaustion.
4. Accept that circumstances will change. The balance between generations isn’t static. Wilkerson knows her mother’s needs will likely increase while her grandchildren’s need for her will eventually decrease as they grow older. She is already thinking about retirement so she can be available if her mother’s needs become greater. Compton similarly learned to adapt as her mother’s dementia progressed, changing how she managed family gatherings and visits to protect her mother’s well-being.
5. Know that sometimes one generation has to come first. Even the best-laid plans won’t eliminate competing needs. There were times when Compton had to prioritize her mother’s needs over her grandchildren’s. “She was less adaptable and able to adjust to changing situations, so I had to protect her,” Compton says. During holiday dinners, she would sit beside her mother to provide help. “I would sit the kids in one room, and the adults would sit in another and that worked better for mom. I would also find a quiet space for her to visit with a few family members at a time so it was less overwhelming.”
6. Take care of your own health needs. It’s not about being selfish. Canceling doctors’ appointments and skipping preventive exams isn’t good in the long run. As Iyengar points out, prioritizing others at the cost of your own health works only as a short-term emergency response — make it a habit, and the system inevitably collapses. “When you consistently operate on empty, your patience wears thin, quiet resentment begins to replace genuine care, and you risk burning out to the point where you transition from being the caregiver to needing care yourself,” says Iyengar.
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