Caring for a Parent with Dementia While Raising Kids: Surviving the Sandwich Generation

When you're simultaneously caring for a parent with dementia and raising your own children, you're being pulled in impossible directions. Your daughter needs help with homework while your mom is wandering toward the door. Your son has a soccer game the same time as your dad's doctor appointment. Your teenager needs emotional support through a breakup, but you're too exhausted from managing your mother's sundowning to have anything left to give. You're trying to be a good parent and a good daughter, and you're failing at both because there simply aren't enough hours or enough of you to go around.

The term "sandwich generation" sounds almost benign, but the reality is crushing. You're raising children who need you to be present, engaged, and emotionally available while simultaneously caring for a parent who's losing their mind and needs constant supervision. Your children see you stressed, exhausted, and always prioritizing Grandma. Your parent isn't getting the patient, attentive care they deserve. And you're disappearing under the weight of it all, with no time for your marriage, your health, or yourself.

This isn't just hard. It's unsustainable without significant support and strategic choices about what you can and can't do. Understanding how to balance these competing needs, protect your children from being consumed by caregiving, maintain some version of family life, and survive with your health and sanity intact requires honest assessment and difficult decisions.

In this guide, you'll learn how to manage competing demands, how to protect your children while involving them appropriately, how to maintain your marriage under extreme stress, when to ask for outside help, and how to recognize when the situation has become unsustainable.

If You Only Do 3 Things in the First Week

Why Is Caring for a Parent with Dementia While Raising Kids So Difficult?

Short answer: You're meeting the intense needs of two generations simultaneously, both requiring significant time, energy, and emotional availability. Children need consistency and presence for healthy development. Dementia patients need constant supervision and escalating care. These needs conflict directly, creating impossible choices and chronic stress.

Competing Developmental Needs

• Children need predictability and routine. Kids thrive on consistency. Dementia care is unpredictable and disruptive.
• Children need emotional presence. Your kids need you mentally and emotionally available, not just physically present. Dementia caregiving leaves you emotionally depleted.
• Dementia patients need constant supervision. Your parent can't be left alone. Every moment focused on your kids is a moment you're worried about your parent.
• Both require your best self. You're being asked to be your best self 24/7 for two sets of people when you're exhausted and overwhelmed.

Practical Conflicts

• Scheduling impossibilities: School events, doctors' appointments, kids' activities, work. You can't clone yourself.
• Financial strain: Raising kids is expensive. Dementia care is expensive. Many sandwich generation caregivers face enormous financial pressure.
• No breaks from responsibility: Even when you're with your kids, you're thinking about your parent. There's no mental rest.
• Conflicting emotional tones: Kids need a home that feels happy and stable. Dementia brings grief, tension, and stress into the home.
• Your own needs disappear: No time for self-care, marriage, friendships, health, or rest. You're pouring from an empty cup.

For more on recognizing when the burden has become too heavy, see our guide on signs of caregiver burnout.

How Do I Balance My Children's Needs with My Parent's Care Needs?

Short answer: You can't balance them perfectly. Accept that someone's needs will be unmet sometimes. Prioritize your children's critical developmental needs first, use professional help for your parent's routine care, and protect specific times for your kids that are non-negotiable.

Triage and Prioritization

• Your children's needs come first for developmental milestones. School performances, parent-teacher conferences, birthday parties, important conversations. These shape who your kids become.
• Your parent's safety needs come first for emergencies. True medical emergency or safety crisis takes priority. But routine care can wait or be delegated during kids' important moments.
• Everything else gets triaged. Is this need urgent or can it wait? Can someone else handle it? Make decisions based on real urgency, not guilt.

Protect Specific Family Times Fiercely

• Dinner together: Even 30 minutes, sit together as a family without parent care interrupting.
• Bedtime routine: Your children need the security of a consistent bedtime with you present. This time is sacred.
• One-on-one time with each child: Even 15 minutes per week per child, individually, where they have your full attention.
• Kids' major events: School plays, sports games, graduations. You must be there. Arrange coverage for your parent.

Use Professional Help Strategically

• Adult day programs for your parent: Gets them out during after-school hours when kids need your focus.
• In-home caregivers during key family times: Hire someone for dinnertime, bedtime routines, or during homework hours.
• Respite care for family vacations: Your kids need family time without caregiving.

See our guide on respite care options for more on finding and affording help.

How Do I Involve My Children in My Parent's Care Without Burdening Them?

Short answer: Age-appropriate involvement teaches compassion and family responsibility, but children should never be primary caregivers, miss their own activities for caregiving, or be responsible for tasks that cause them distress. Their childhood and development come first.

Age-Appropriate Involvement

Young children (under 8):

• Simple, short interactions: bringing Grandma a snack, showing her a drawing
• No responsibility for care tasks or supervision
• Should not witness difficult behaviors when possible
• Limit time in caregiving environment if it's disrupting their play and development

School-age children (8-12):

• Reading to or doing simple activities with grandparent
• Fetching items or delivering messages
• Helping with very simple tasks (setting the table)
• Should never be alone responsible for grandparent
• Should still have normal activities, friends, and childhood experiences

Teenagers (13-18):

• Can help with some care tasks IF they're willing (not forced)
• Might provide company while you're nearby
• Can help with errands or light household tasks that free you up
• Should NOT be parentified caregivers or miss school/activities
• Should have the option to say no without guilt

What Crosses the Line into Harmful Parentification

• Primary caregiving responsibility: Kids should never be the primary caregiver or responsible for their grandparent's safety.
• Intimate care tasks: Children should not help with bathing, toileting, or dressing.
• Responsibility for emotional wellbeing: Kids shouldn't manage behavioral issues or feel responsible for grandparent's happiness.
• Sacrificing their own needs: If kids are giving up sports, friends, sleep, or schoolwork to help, you've crossed into harmful territory.
• Exposure to traumatic behaviors: Kids shouldn't regularly witness aggression, severe confusion, or end-of-life decline.

For more on helping kids understand what's happening, see our communication strategies.

How Do I Protect My Marriage During Sandwich Generation Caregiving?

Short answer: Schedule time alone with your spouse even if brief, communicate about resentments before they explode, make decisions together about caregiving limits, seek couples counseling early if needed, and recognize that some marriages don't survive this level of stress without intervention.

Common Marriage Strains

• No time or energy for relationship: Every moment is consumed. You're co-managers of chaos, not partners.
• Resentment builds: One partner may feel the other isn't helping enough. Resentments fester when there's no time to address them.
• Different opinions about care: One wants parent in the home, the other wants facility placement. These become marriage-ending conflicts.
• Financial stress: Paying for care while raising kids creates enormous pressure. Money fights increase.
• Sacrificing the non-caregiver spouse's needs: They feel like they've lost their partner.

Protecting Your Marriage

• Schedule protected couple time weekly: Even 30 minutes walking together. This time is non-negotiable.
• Have weekly planning meetings: Ten minutes to coordinate schedules, discuss caregiving decisions, check in emotionally.
• Address resentments immediately: Don't let things fester. Address issues when they're small.
• Make major caregiving decisions together: Facility placement, spending, whether parent lives with you. Both must agree.
• Divide responsibilities clearly: Who handles what? Clear divisions prevent conflicts.
• Get couples therapy early: Don't wait until marriage is in crisis.

When marriage is in serious trouble: Prioritize the marriage over parent's care. If it's marriage or continuing home caregiving, choose the marriage. Your kids need their parents together more than they need Grandma living with you.

When Should I Consider Facility Placement Instead of Home Care?

Short answer: Consider facility placement when home caregiving is damaging your children's wellbeing, destroying your marriage, causing your own health crisis, or when your parent needs 24/7 supervision you can't safely provide while parenting. Your children's needs come first.

Signs Home Caregiving Is Unsustainable

• Your children are suffering: Grades dropping, behavioral issues, anxiety or depression, loss of normal childhood. If your kids are being damaged, it must change.
• Your marriage is failing: Constant fighting, emotional disconnection, one spouse threatening to leave. Your children need their parents' marriage intact.
• You're having health crises: Severe stress-related illness, dangerous exhaustion, mental health breakdown. You cannot care for anyone if you're destroyed.
• Safety risks to children or parent: If your parent's behaviors pose risk to your kids or you can't adequately supervise parent while caring for kids, someone will get hurt.
• No life outside caregiving for months: Haven't had dinner as a family or time with kids without interruption. This isn't sustainable.
• Financial ruin: Paying for home care while raising kids is causing severe financial stress.
• Parent needs 24/7 supervision: If parent can never be left alone and you have kids who need attention, you're being asked to be in two places simultaneously.

Why Facility Placement Might Be Right

• Allows you to be a parent again: Visiting your parent in memory care means you're present for your kids' daily life.
• Your parent gets better care: Professionals trained in dementia care, 24/7 supervision, structured activities.
• Preserves your health and marriage: Removing the impossible burden allows you to function as a spouse and parent.
• Models healthy boundaries: Shows kids that it's okay to recognize limits and make hard decisions.

For more on recognizing when it's time and how to choose a facility, see our guides on when to know it's time for memory care and how to choose a memory care facility.

What Should We Expect as Dementia Progresses?

Short answer: Care needs increase while your children's needs don't decrease. The impossibility of managing both intensifies. Most sandwich generation families eventually need either extensive professional help or facility placement. Planning ahead for this inevitability makes the transition less chaotic.

• Early stage: You might manage both with stress but relative functionality. This is the honeymoon phase that feels manageable.
• Middle stage: This is typically when crisis hits. Parent needs intensive care, kids still need active parenting. Something has to give. Many families reach breaking point here.
• Late stage: If parent is still at home, care is 24/7 and total. This is usually impossible while parenting. Most families have transitioned to facility care by this point.
• Your children grow but needs don't disappear: Even as kids get older, they still need you through teen years and young adulthood.

For understanding the trajectory of dementia, see our dementia symptom progression timeline.

How CareThru Can Help You Manage Competing Demands

Juggling parent care and child-raising requires extreme organization when you're already overwhelmed.

CareThru helps you keep your parent's care information organized (medications, appointments, care tasks) in one place so you're not trying to remember everything while also managing your kids' schedules.

You can coordinate with other family members or hired caregivers so you know who's covering what times, allowing you to plan around your children's needs.

If you have a spouse or other family members helping, sharing access to CareThru ensures everyone knows what needs to happen for your parent without constant communication that takes time away from your kids.

Frequently Asked Questions About Caring for Parent While Raising Kids

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional family therapy, counseling, or care planning advice. If your children are showing signs of distress, seek professional mental health support for them.

Final Thoughts: Your Children's Needs Come First

This is hard to hear when you love your parent and want to honor them: but your children's needs must come first. They didn't choose this situation. They're in a critical developmental period. The choices you make now will affect who they become as adults. Sacrificing their childhood, your presence in their lives, or your marriage to provide home care for your parent is too high a price.

You're being asked to do something nearly impossible: meet the intensive, competing needs of two generations while maintaining your own health and marriage. There's no version of this that's easy or comfortable. But there are versions that damage your children and versions that don't. That's the line that matters.

Using professional help isn't weakness or abandonment. Facility placement isn't betrayal. Prioritizing your children over your parent's preference to stay home isn't selfish. These are difficult but necessary decisions that protect the people who need you most and who you're most responsible for: your children and your immediate family.

You can't be everything to everyone. You can be a good enough parent while managing your parent's care, or you can be a good enough daughter while raising your kids. But trying to be perfect at both will destroy you, and then everyone loses.

For more support on your journey, explore our resources on respite care, asking siblings for help, and recognizing caregiver burnout. You're not alone, and you deserve support for this impossible balancing act.