A scam text. A forgotten password. An insurance bill written in a language no one seems meant to understand. For millions of Americans, these are the everyday tasks of caring for an aging parent, and increasingly, of parenting the people who once parented us.
About 1 in every 4 Americans is now a family caregiver — a 45% increase over the last decade. And since most care recipients are adults over 75, we often frame this as a story about aging boomers. But the untold half of that story is the younger people on the other end of those phone calls, hospital visits and late-night emergencies. Young people who are also, at a time when it feels like the world is imploding, trying to figure out how to live their own lives.
If this feels unfamiliar, let’s consider the data.
In the U.S., a recent national study estimates about 1.6 million teens ages 15-18 and 2 million young adults ages 19-22 provide care to adults — about 1 in 10 people their age. Other research suggests that as many as 5.4 million children and adolescents in this country are quietly supporting parents, grandparents, siblings or other relatives who need help because of illness, disability, mental health challenges or substance use.
A recent New York Times Magazine investigation makes visible what this data can obscure: When formal care systems fall short, the work does not disappear — it often lands on whoever is at home, including children.
These are not edge cases. This is a generation quietly holding the infrastructure of American family life together.
And it’s not just physical care. The Census Bureau found that 4.3 million adults sent voluntary financial support to their parents in 2020, totaling roughly $17.5 billion. That figure is more than the entire federal budget for WIC and Head Start that same year. Programs designed to support children, funded at about the same scale as kids quietly supporting parents.
This reality lands differently depending on where you sit. In cultures where multigenerational households are the norm and elder care is understood as a collective project, young people may still shoulder heavy responsibility, but they are less likely to do it alone and without support. Elsewhere, where adulthood is framed as a solo achievement and families are often scattered across geographies, reverse parenting often plays out in private, over text and FaceTime, without the community infrastructure that would make it sustainable. Distance compounds everything. When the closest family member is a six-hour flight away, every crisis becomes a logistical emergency on top of an emotional one.
Certainly, the issue is not whether young people should care for their parents. Love, obligation and reciprocity are part of so many family stories, including mine. The question is why we’ve accepted a system that relies on 22-year-olds to backstop the failures of our health, housing and retirement systems.
There will be another panicked phone call tonight about a bill, a lab result or a fall. On one end will be a parent who deserves real care; on the other, a young person quietly rearranging their life to provide it. In the space between those two realities, love becomes spreadsheets, airport runs, extra shifts and whispered reassurances at sleepless hours. It is beautiful, ordinary, world‑saving work — and it is far too heavy to keep pretending it can be carried alone.
As former first lady Rosalynn Carter said, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need a caregiver.”
Which are you?
Joshua Lavra is a New York-based artist, principal at Hopelab and a public voices fellow on youth well-being and power with the OpEd Project and Hopelab.
