You Took Your Mother’s Call in the Car Park, Between Two Meetings
Load · The Reading Room, Vol. 91 · 7 min read · What the caregiving data says about your exact age group, and the thing worth handing over first
Based on the published research of Lianlian Lei, PhD — Research Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, whose peer-reviewed study of sandwich generation caregivers found equal caregiving hours but a substantially higher emotional cost. Faculty profile
Two households run on your attention and neither of them knows about the other. The numbers on what that costs landed in February, and women aged 40 to 54 sit at the top of them.
I once took a call about my mother’s blood pressure in a supermarket car park, holding a bag for life that contained a birthday card and a cucumber. I remember the cucumber because I looked at it for some time afterwards, in the way you look at things when your brain has briefly stepped out.
Fourteen minutes on the phone. Then back inside for the rest of the shop, then home, then a conversation with my son about whether an unconditional offer is a good thing or a trap, then dinner, then the pharmacy website, which had logged me out again.
Somewhere in there my mother told me I sounded tired and I said I was fine, which is the family motto and should honestly be on a crest.
I keep a note on my phone called Mum — meds. I keep another called Sam — sixth form. For four months in 2024 I kept a third called me. It contained one word: dentist. I did not go.
The short answer: you are not failing at balance. You are a load-bearing wall between two households, and load-bearing walls are not permitted a wobble. The research says the punishing part is not the hours — it is that there is no room in your life where you are off duty.
The skim version
- A February 2026 index built from more than 19,200 caregiver assessments found 64% of working women in the sandwich generation at breaking-point risk.¹
- Women aged 40 to 54 carried the highest burnout risk of any age group in that dataset, at 46%.¹
- For women handling perimenopause alongside caregiving, the figure was 51%.¹
- A peer-reviewed 2022 study found sandwich caregivers roughly twice as likely to report financial difficulty (36% vs 17%) and more likely to report substantial emotional difficulty (44% vs 32%).²
- Both groups in that study put in around the same monthly caregiving hours — about 75. Same hours, worse outcome. The difference is structural, not effort.²
In this article: It is not the hours · What “not coping” looks like · The thing to hand over first · FAQ
It is not the hours. That is the whole point.
This is the finding that reorganised how I think about it.
When researchers compared people caring for an ageing parent and raising a child under 18 against people caring for a parent alone, the monthly caregiving hours came out about the same — roughly 75 for both.² The sandwich group were not doing dramatically more caring. They were doing the same amount of caring and reporting substantially more emotional difficulty while doing it.
So the extra cost is not volume. It is architecture.
Ordinary caregiving is punishing but it has an off position. You come home from your mother’s and you are, for a few hours, not the daughter of someone unwell. You are in the other room.
Sandwich caregiving removes the other room. Both roles are live everywhere. The phone rings about your mother while you are at work. The school emails while you are at your mother’s. There is no location on earth where both of them are switched off, and recovery — actual recovery, the physiological kind — requires somewhere to do it.
There is no room left where you are off duty.
That is why the standard advice lands so badly. Take a break. A break from what, precisely? Both jobs are running in your head in every room you walk into, including the one with the bath in it.
What the research found
Lei, Leggett, and Maust compared 194 sandwich caregivers with 912 caregivers looking after an older adult alone, using national US survey data. Monthly caregiving hours were similar between the two groups, roughly 75 each, but sandwich caregivers reported financial difficulty at more than twice the rate (36% vs 17%) and substantial emotional difficulty more often (44% vs 32%).²
The limitation: the sandwich-caregiver sample was small, 194 people, and the authors note it captured little detail about the children involved. It establishes the pattern’s direction and size in this dataset, not a precise national estimate.²
What “not coping” actually looks like from the inside
The cruel thing about this pattern is that it presents as personal failure and almost never is.
| What you call it | What it actually is |
|---|---|
| “I’ve become so forgetful” | You are holding two medication schedules, two calendars and two sets of paperwork in a head built for one |
| “I’m so short with everyone” | Every conversation arrives as an interruption because every conversation genuinely is one |
| “I can’t be bothered to see anyone” | Socialising requires the off position. You do not currently have one |
| “I’ve let myself go” | The only appointment in your diary with no one else’s name on it is the one that gets cancelled |
| “Everyone else manages” | Two-thirds of the working women in your exact position are at breaking-point risk. You are looking at their outsides¹ |
One honest note on the numbers, because we do not do vagueness here: more than half of the highest-risk caregivers in that index screened positive on a short anxiety and depression questionnaire.¹ A screening tool identifies who should be asked more questions. It does not hand anybody a diagnosis, and you should not award yourself one from a paragraph in an article. What it tells you is that this is a very well-populated place to be standing — and that if you have been wondering whether to mention any of it to a GP, wondering is generally the point at which people should.
Between us
Two sources here, and they deserve different amounts of trust. The 64% and the 46% come from Cleo’s third annual Family Health Index, published February 2026 and built from over 19,200 member assessments — a large dataset, and the age breakdown is the most useful thing in it: women 40 to 54 topped every other group for burnout risk.¹ The second source is peer-reviewed and independent: Lianlian Lei, Amanda Leggett and Donovan Maust, in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, using national US survey data to compare 194 sandwich caregivers with 912 others. That is where the financial and emotional difficulty gaps come from, and where the equal-hours finding comes from.²
Being fair about it: Cleo is a company that sells caregiving support to employers, and a business measuring the size of the problem it also sells the fix for is worth reading with one eyebrow raised. Its assessments come from people already enrolled in a benefit, which is not the general population. The academic study is cleaner but small — 194 sandwich caregivers — and the authors note it captured little about the children involved. Neither can tell you what will happen to you. What they agree on, from opposite directions, is that the emotional cost sits well above what the hours alone would predict, and that our age band is where it concentrates.
If both households only hold together because you are the one holding the whole picture, the Quiet Audit is ten private minutes on what you are actually carrying. Start here.
Who else has measured this
The peer-reviewed side of this research has more than one name on it.
Amanda Leggett, PhD, Associate Professor at Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology, co-authored the 2022 Journal of the American Geriatrics Society study on sandwich generation caregivers cited above, alongside Donovan Maust, MD, of the University of Michigan Medical School. Faculty profile
The thing to hand over first — and it is not the caring
Nobody wants to delegate the caring. The caring is often the part with the meaning in it, and being the one who sits with her is not a burden you are trying to escape.
The admin is a different animal entirely.
The repeat prescription. The appointment that has to be booked at 8:01 or not at all. The form. The chasing of the form. The forty minutes of hold music. The insurance renewal. The bank, which will only speak to you in person, on a Wednesday, in 1997.
None of that requires love or history. It requires a functioning adult and an hour. And in most sandwich households there is at least one other functioning adult — a sibling, a partner, a nearly-grown child who is perfectly capable of ringing a dentist.
So: hand over a whole category, permanently, including the noticing. Not a task. A task hands back the easy third and keeps you monitoring the rest. The noticing is the job, and it is the part that never switches off.
Pick the household where you are not the only option — usually the one with the teenager in it, not the one with your mother in it — and move one repeating category out of your head for good.
The sentence, if you want one
“I’m not asking for help with this. I’m asking for it to stop being mine — including remembering it’s due. If it gets missed, that’s the handover working, not me being difficult.”
Short, unpadded, and it does not require anyone to admit they have been letting you carry it.
What changes
Not the total. One category out of two households is a rounding error, and I would rather say that plainly than sell you a transformation you would be right not to believe in.
What changes is the discovery that a thing can leave your head and stay gone. That the holding is a job rather than a personality trait or a moral obligation or evidence that you love people more than your brother does. Jobs can move. Duty cannot, which is why it has to be described as a job before anything shifts.
And there is a second-order effect worth knowing about. The reason so many women in this position never ask is that they cannot picture what asking would even sound like — the request feels enormous and unreasonable and likely to cause a scene. It usually is not. It usually takes about eleven seconds, and the other person says, mildly, “yeah, fine.” Which is its own particular kind of infuriating.
I did go to the dentist, in the end. Eleven months late. One filling and a small lecture, which I felt I had earned.
The one move
This week, pick one repeating admin category from the household where you are not the only option, and hand over the whole thing — the doing and the remembering. Then do the hard part: do not check whether it happened.
If you have never seen both households written down on one page, the Quiet Audit is ten minutes of putting them side by side where the size of it is finally visible. No advice, no programme. Start here.
Questions worth answering directly
Am I actually a “sandwich generation” caregiver, or is that a bigger label than my situation?
If you are giving ongoing help to a parent or older relative while also raising or supporting a child, you fit the definition researchers use, regardless of how many hours it comes to. The label describes the structure, not a minimum severity.
Is the burnout risk really about my exact age group, or does that just sound alarming?
In the February 2026 index, women aged 40 to 54 did carry the highest burnout risk of any age band measured, at 46%. That is a pattern in one large dataset from people already enrolled in a caregiving benefit, not a diagnosis of any individual reader.¹
Should I just cut back on caregiving hours to cope better?
The research suggests hours are not the main driver of the extra difficulty sandwich caregivers report. The equal-hours finding means the problem is more about having no off position than about sheer volume, which is why handing over a whole category tends to help more than trimming hours at the margins.²
What if the person I would hand a task to does it worse than I would?
Probably, at first. That is the cost of a genuine handover, not a sign it was the wrong call. The alternative, keeping every category yourself because nobody else does it your way, is what got you here.
Is any of this a substitute for talking to my GP if I am not coping?
No. A screening tool or a burnout statistic can tell you that you are in good company; it cannot assess you personally. If exhaustion, low mood, or anxiety are new, worsening, or not lifting, that is worth raising with a clinician directly.
Related reading: the four-part job researchers measured, why you are the one who remembers every family date, and the guilt hangover that follows a boundary, and why it is not proof you were wrong.
On the researcher. Lianlian Lei studies caregiving and mental health at a population level; her published research describes patterns across the caregivers surveyed and is not an assessment of any individual reader’s situation.
Sourcing, disclosure and disclaimers
This is not medical or therapeutic advice. Blue Leaf Journal publishes general information for a general readership. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a substitute for guidance from a licensed clinician.
We are not clinicians or researchers. Blue Leaf Journal is an independent publication. We read published research and translate it. The findings belong to the researchers and organisations named and linked above; the plain-English rendering is ours, and so is any error in it.
No affiliation and no endorsement. Blue Leaf Journal is not affiliated with Lianlian Lei, Amanda Leggett, Donovan Maust, Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, or Cleo. None of them has reviewed, approved or endorsed this article, and none of them is responsible for it. They are cited because their published research and data are the basis for what it says.
No commercial relationship. Nobody named above paid for or was paid for this coverage. There are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and no gifted products in this article.
How this was checked. Every figure above is drawn from the primary sources, each linked in the references, and can be verified there. Sources were checked on 7 September 2026. If you find something we have got wrong, write to jobrennan@blueleafjournal.com and we will correct it and say that we did.
References
1. Cleo (2026). 3rd Annual Family Health Index Report. Based on 19,200+ member assessments, published February 2026.
2. Lei, L., Leggett, A. N., & Maust, D. T. (2022). A national profile of sandwich generation caregivers providing care to both older adults and children. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
Jo Brennan writes the Load desk at Blue Leaf Journal — the invisible work, the admin, and the jobs that are technically nobody’s and are therefore hers. The note on her phone marked me now has two things in it, which she is treating as a growth industry.
Updated: 7 September 2026.
