Nearly half of parents raising kids while also caring for aging parents are letting their marriage quietly slide rather than deal with it head-on. In a new survey of these “sandwich generation” caregivers from Care.com’s 2026 caregiver report, 49% say they’ve missed or scaled back time with a spouse or partner over the past year, and 72% describe feeling lonely despite being surrounded by people who depend on them every day.
Key Points
- 49% of sandwich generation caregivers have missed or reduced time with a spouse or partner in the past year, per the Care.com report
- 72% feel lonely even though they’re the ones holding multiple generations together
- 80% feel mentally overloaded from care-related decisions, and the same share say they need a break but don’t know how to take one
- 81% report carrying more of the stress load than a partner or sibling who could be sharing it
- Caregivers spend an average of 24 hours a week coordinating care, rising to 27 hours for mothers specifically
The math behind that loneliness is blunt. Ninety-three percent of respondents in the Care.com data say they feel personally responsible for holding multiple generations together, and 84% describe themselves as the “default person” everyone turns to first — for a school pickup, a doctor’s appointment, a parent’s medication schedule. That role rarely comes with a built-in stopping point, and marriage is often what absorbs the overflow. When a day is already spent negotiating a teenager’s schedule and a parent’s care plan, the relationship that gets no calendar slot is usually the one assumed to run on autopilot.
That assumption is where the 49% figure becomes more than a statistic. Missing date night or skipping a real conversation with a partner doesn’t register as a crisis in the moment — it reads as a reasonable trade-off on an impossibly full day. Repeated often enough, though, it becomes the quiet mechanism by which a marriage erodes without either partner naming what’s happening. The 72% loneliness rate suggests plenty of caregivers already feel that erosion, even if they haven’t called it by name.
Jill McNamara, Care.com’s VP of Strategic Growth, frames the caregiving load itself in more generous terms: “Nearly every person in this survey told us they have grown because of caregiving — more empathetic, more patient, clearer on what actually matters.” The tension is that clarity about what matters doesn’t automatically protect the relationship closest to home. Sandwich generation caregivers can gain real perspective from the work and still let a marriage go unattended in the process — the two outcomes aren’t contradictory, they’re happening to the same people at the same time.
The report closes on a telling number: 96% of sandwich generation caregivers wish the broader U.S. care system did more to support families like theirs. That’s not a group looking for an exit from caregiving — it’s a group asking for the structural support that would let them stop treating their marriage as the thing they’re permitted to neglect.
