When Edna Lopez-Rodriguez graduated from college in the midst of the pandemic, she moved back home to Florida with her parents because she was having trouble finding a job. A few months later, her father had a stroke, and Lopez-Rodriguez’s life flipped upside down. At 21, she was now a caregiver. Lopez-Rodriguez took a job at Disney to help bring in extra money while she and her mother took turns taking care of her father.
“He couldn’t shower, he couldn’t eat. He had to be tube fed. We were like factory workers working on his body,” she tells Fast Company. “That was the moment I actually felt like I’d lost my dad.”
Yet what she found the hardest was the isolation, not only from her peers but also the rest of the world. Lopez-Rodriguez has half siblings on her father’s side, but they were older and married. The bulk of the care fell mostly on her and her mother’s shoulders. “People didn’t understand,” she says. “It’s hard on your mental health, and I was exhausted.”
According to a recent report from Caring.com, 72% of Gen Z expect to care for their aging parents, yet only 61% of Gen X and baby boomers imagine that their children will be involved in their future care. Despite the significant percentage of young people who expect to be caregivers at some point in the future, only 16% are aware of the costs involved—about $50,000 to $70,000 a year.
Meanwhile, fewer than 40% of Gen X and baby boomers have talked to their children about what being a caregiver might involve, even as caregiving is increasingly requiring more from younger generations. According to a report from AARP, unpaid labor from family caregivers ballooned from $470 billion in 2017 to $600 billion in 2021. This cost has been steadily rising over the past 25 years, and is exacerbated by shortages in the caregiver industry as well the demographic shift toward an aging population.
All of this points to a looming caregiving crisis for Gen Z, and many of its members are already feeling the pressure.
Karen Ngo, 27, said she’s started growing more concerned about her parents’ futures within the last year. “When I first graduated, I was focused on getting a job,” she says. However, once Ngo was more established and safely ensconced as a communications manager at a major tech company, she started thinking about how she could take care of her parents, who are immigrants from Vietnam.
“As my parents are getting older, I don’t want to see them have to work so hard. I keep thinking about what I can do to alleviate the burden.” However, she notes that it’s early days yet and she hasn’t talked specifics with her parents about what care might involve or how much financial support she’d contribute. “They’re still kinda in the denial phase,” she said.
For Lopez-Rodriguez, there is no denial phase. Her father’s illness rerouted her whole life. She’d been a creative writing major, but with her father’s blessing she decided to get her master’s in marketing. Three months before she graduated, her father passed away.
Today, Lopez-Rodriguez is a social media specialist. She is keenly aware that she’s her mother’s only child and that in time, she will very likely find herself thrust into a caregiver role once again. “A lot of people think about saving for vacations, their kids’ college fund, but I have to save for my mom," she says. "There’s not a lot of assistance out there.”
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