Caring for aging parents and young kids in the same season of life is exhausting enough on its own. New research shows it is also reshaping the relationships that are supposed to be the caregiver’s own support system. According to Care.com’s 2026 Sandwich Generation Caregiver Report, 49% of adults juggling both kids and aging parents say they have deprioritized their relationship with a spouse or partner because of caregiving demands. It is a quiet cost that rarely shows up in the conversation about sandwich-generation caregiving, which tends to focus on logistics, money, and burnout rather than the partnership sitting at the center of the household doing the caregiving in the first place.
A Bigger Group Than It Used to Be
This is not a small or unusual arrangement anymore. AARP’s Caregiving in the US 2025 report found the total number of family caregivers has climbed to 63 million Americans, a 45% increase over the past decade. Within that group, 29% fall into the sandwich generation category, caring for both children and adults at once, and that share jumps to 47% among caregivers under 50. Roughly one in four American adults is now providing some form of family care, and a large share of the younger ones are doing it in both directions simultaneously.
The Relationship Is the First Thing to Get Cut
Care.com’s report frames the 49% figure as part of a broader pattern of caregivers backburnering entire parts of their own lives, not just their marriage. The same report found 80% of sandwich generation caregivers feel mentally overloaded by the sheer volume of care decisions they are making, and 72% report feeling lonely despite being surrounded by people who depend on them, according to Care.com. That combination, mental overload plus loneliness, helps explain why the partner relationship is often what slips first. It is usually the one relationship in the house that does not have an urgent deadline attached to it. A kid’s school pickup has a hard time. A parent’s medication schedule has a hard time. A conversation with your spouse about how you are both actually doing does not, so it gets pushed to tomorrow, and then the tomorrow after that.
Care.com also found that 80% of sandwich generation caregivers say they need a break but do not know how to take one, per the same data. That number matters here because a relationship that keeps getting deprioritized needs exactly the kind of unstructured time this group says it cannot find. You cannot repair a partnership in the fifteen minutes between the last chore of the day and falling asleep, and for half of sandwich generation caregivers, that may be all the time that is left.
Why This Gets Missed
Most of the public conversation about sandwich generation caregiving centers on the visible costs: missed work, drained savings, physical exhaustion. Those are real and well documented. What is harder to measure, and easier to overlook, is what happens to the marriage or partnership quietly absorbing the overflow while everyone’s attention goes to the kids and the parents. A caregiver skipping their own doctor’s appointment gets noticed eventually because it shows up as a health problem. A caregiver skipping date night, or skipping the hard conversation about how stretched thin they both feel, does not show up anywhere until it has already done damage.
There is also a timing problem baked into this life stage. AARP’s data shows the average family caregiver is 51 years old, which for a lot of sandwich generation households falls right in the stretch when a marriage has already weathered decades of smaller pressures, raising kids, careers, financial setbacks, and is now being asked to absorb one more layer without any additional time or energy to work with. A partnership that could once coast through a rough month on momentum alone has less room to do that when both people are also managing a parent’s medical appointments and a child’s school schedule in the same week.
What Actually Helps
None of this means the relationship has to lose out permanently. Caregiving researchers consistently point to the same fix, and it is not complicated: treating time with a partner as a scheduled commitment rather than whatever is left over after everything else gets handled. That might mean a standing weekly check-in that is treated with the same seriousness as a doctor’s appointment, or splitting caregiving tasks explicitly enough that neither partner is quietly absorbing more than the other without either of them noticing it happening. The caregivers who report doing best are rarely the ones with the lightest workload. They are usually the ones who found a way to keep naming the relationship as a priority out loud, even when the calendar did not have room for it.
The Bottom Line
Nearly half of sandwich generation caregivers are quietly setting their partnership aside to keep everything else running, and the caregiving population doing this is only getting larger. The costs of this life stage were never just financial or physical. They were relational too, and that piece has mostly gone undiscussed until data like this put a number on it.
