Gen Xers have raised their kids. Now, they’re caring for parents | Opinion

A college pal of mine routinely drives across Massachusetts to visit his retired father and bring him cartons of cigarettes purchased in the lower-tax state of New Hampshire to save his fixed-income, widower dad some money.

Another visits her widowed mother-in-law every weekend to help with chores around the house, and even pitches in to help an aunt-in-law with dementia.

Meanwhile, my husband and his two sisters take turns going to their father’s apartment every weekend to dole out their bedridden dad’s medicine, do his grocery shopping, handle his bills and medical care and make sure his home healthcare aides have what they need.

I bring my own father his medicine weekly — a rainbow of pills tidily tucked inside a rotating series of pillboxes. I pay his bills, schedule and take him to medical appointments, and run errands for him as he no longer drives. The place I frequent most often, other than my house, is the drug store.

All of these adult children are Gen Xers. All of our parents have lost their longtime spouses, and we are attempting to help. That’s when we’re not fielding questions from our twentysomething children about how to handle adulting, like what to do after you have a fender bender and how to deal with one’s health insurer.

All of us have arrived at the stage of our lives where we’ve become the glue holding the generations together. We host the holiday events. We keep everyone up-to-date on family news, like the family town crier. This being-the-glue-of-the-family seems to have happened slowly, then all at once. We went from being the ones with the lives built around raising our children and trying to advance our careers to the ones who’ve added parenting our parents to our to-do lists.

Nearly every conversation winds up becoming a status update on our parents or our nascent adult children as we exchange war stories and engage in gallows humor, similar to what we did decades ago when we were navigating the early days of childrearing. Our own lives can seem like afterthoughts, which isn’t new for the oft-ignored GenX generation.

Yet as we enter this new era of our lives, guidance is sparse. How-to books on raising kids tend to top out at the teenage years. There isn’t much guidance on how to give young adult children the support they need while simultaneously respecting their autonomy and trying not to anger them.

Meanwhile, we’re doing the same thing with our parents, most of whom are living solo for the first time after decades of marriage. We’re trying to give them the support they need while simultaneously respecting their autonomy and trying not to anger them.

It’s trickier doing this with your mother or father, who may have developed myriad unhealthy or unwise habits since you left home. Do we refuse to help them obtain unhealthy food? Do we tell them we’re not getting them cigarettes or alcohol or intervene if their drinking is out of control?

If we’re paying our parents’ bills, do we prevent financial damage from buying things they don’t need or spending money on scams? New York magazine recently published a long feature about a writer’s failed attempts to prevent his widower father from participating in an online romance scam that cost tens of thousands of dollars; trying to alert his father to the fact that this was a fraudulent website just enraged the 82-year-old and drove a wedge between them.

When I sat down to write my latest novel, “Louie on the Rocks,” part of my motivation was to explore the role of an adult child, Lulu, and her widower father, Louie, as they clash over his choices, chiefly, about how Louie is spending his money. Louie firmly believes Lulu should butt out, but Lulu takes him to court to try to seize control over his finances, noting his decisions are affected by his spiraling alcoholism. It doesn’t end well.

In my own life, years after our mother died, my brother and I started handling most of our father’s finances and caring for his house. There were a multitude of uncomfortable bumps along the way. While my dad thanks us for our assistance, he chafes, naturally, at financial constraints. It no doubt feels insulting and infantilizing to have the people whose diapers you once changed suddenly telling you that you don’t need that credit card or giving you only $50 instead of the $100 you requested.

Then there’s the dementia issue.

A study from the journal Nature Medicine found that two in five people older than 55 will develop dementia in their later years. Given the size of the Baby Boomer generation, the number who’ll be diagnosed with dementia is higher than previously thought. The number of cases is expected to double by 2060.

Then, throw in the drinking.

Business Insider recently declared that “Baby Boomers Love Booze.” That’s underplaying it. “Alcohol use is increasing among adults 65 and older and the size of this population is expanding rapidly,” says a report in the medical journal Alcohol, adding that Boomers drink more than their predecessors in the Silent Generation.

That means a growing number of Gen Xers and older Millennials will probably soon find themselves deeply entrenched in their parents’ lives, paying their bills, monitoring their activities (like telling them not to give a credit card number to someone who called claiming to be a grandson who’s been arrested and needs bail money), and making sure they’re not drinking too much.

Sounds a lot like parenting one’s parents, who are likely to rebel just like our teenage children did. Maybe we’re the ones who are going to need that drink.

This story was originally published July 10, 2025 at 5:27 AM.