Rebecca* is from a large family. One of five siblings, and being the eldest, she has long understood the largely unspoken but no less potent expectation of caring for her parents. Now in her mid-60s, Rebecca is looking after her close to 90-year-old father, has adult children herself, and grandchildren. She is surrounded on all sides by societal, filial, family expectations to care. She is without a doubt, at the pressurised centre of what is now called, ‘the sandwich generation’. Rebecca is not alone, 2025 government figures show that over 1.5 million Australians are part of this ‘squished’ generation, caring for ageing parents, children and more often than not, the extra piece of bread with sprinkles, grandchildren. What advocates and psychologists say hasn’t been addressed is that 91% of those in the sandwich are women, and more importantly still, there is a growing subset that are caring for parents where relationships and dynamics are strained and damaging; In one catch-all word, ‘difficult’.
Rebecca and other family carers want that word ‘difficult’ to be unpacked. It’s a challenging conversation but one with millions of lives across the world riding on it. For many carers, predominantly women, there is, as they describe, a suffocating expectation, particularly as the oldest female child, to care for parents that have, in some cases, been uncaring, traumatising and abusive in years past and present. They say Australia as a nation, the health and aged care systems and society in general, needs to bear witness without quick judgment. Advocates and psychologists are increasingly speaking up, in some cases, adult kids looking after their parents is not safe, healthy or sustainable, and from a societal and systemic point of view, there must be support to put up boundaries.
Rebecca is conflicted. Even when speaking about her parents, she doesn’t feel on stable ground, and psychologists say this makes caring, boundaries and safeguarding health all the more draining. Rebecca is conflicted because she often doesn’t feel that her feelings are valid. She has struggled with feeling exhausted, buffeted by the expectations to move her life around to look after her dad, missing out on activities that she loves, like getting outdoors and enjoying quiet time in Australia’s stunning natural places.
This state of fluctuating between feeling exhausted, having an inkling about where it comes from, but under powerful societal and family obligations and expectations, needing to dismiss these feelings has a term. It’s called emotional invalidation. And it’s exhausting, researchers say. Emotional invalidation is the act of dismissing or rejecting someone’s thoughts, feelings or behaviours. The predominant literature focuses on others, in the case of care, seeing parents, siblings or society dismissing concerns and boundaries of carers resisting the obligation to care for abusive parents. But increasingly, psychologists have found that adult children are doing it to themselves.
Rebecca is conflicted because she wants to do the ‘right’ thing by her dad but knows that looking after her dad has changed her life, and resulted in her deteriorating mental and physical health. She was no longer prioritising activities that helped her to feel sane, refreshed and energised. Staying indoors with her father has meant missing out on being out in nature, her safe place, she needed to be there when his unexpected flare-ups in physical health would plummet his mental.
Psychologists and advocates say that speaking to someone outside of the family, preferably an outsider with medical training, is a critical step to framing feelings and upholding the validity of them.
Rebecca does joke that she landed the jackpot with her eldest daughter. She laughs, say what you want about the younger generation she says, they have a spunk and fierceness to wellbeing and boundaries that she was never taught growing up. When in conversations with her daughter, she cherishes her child being passionately blunt.
“Get out of the house, mum, you are going crazy inside. You deserve to go forest bathe, now go, grandad will be fine for two hours on his own. For heaven’s sake mum, you need to detox and do some grounding”.
After quickly going on google to search all the terms her Gen-Y child has provided, Rebecca says she recently felt a lightness, someone having her back, naming what she felt, an empty-tank, and feeling empowered to take steps to try and fill it back up again.
Rebecca’s story highlights the complicated nature of some caring situations and the conversation that needs to be had. She shares that her instability and conflicted feelings of caring for her dad come from knowing that her parents didn’t want to be aloof and removed carers themselves, it was a by-product of their work.
Rebecca’s family moved all around the world. Her parents, working with hospitals and minority groups, most of whom were of low-means and high-needs, meant her parents poured themselves out in their work. She believes they had little left to parent. She hedges his past is why her dad has such high and rigid expectations to be cared for now.
As the eldest daughter, Rebecca quickly understood that she couldn’t expect to receive warmth, affection or care from her parents because they had nothing left. Rather, they looked to her for support, whether emotional or logistical. More so, it then fell to her to help parent her younger siblings.
It was only later that Rebecca understood why her relationships with her siblings were strained, the easy-going joking and familiarity she saw in her friends’ relationships with their siblings seemed foreign. With help from psychologists over years, she started to understand, it’s because she was their ‘parent’, not their sibling.
For many adult carers, the lack of ‘normal’ parent to child relationship, and ‘obligation’ to care starts well before parents age and need senior care. For Rebecca, she looks back and sees that she was leaned on to be a source of strength for her parents from around nine years old. Now over 55 years later, this has compounded complicated feelings, and the exhaustion that comes with the expectation, and provision of care to her father.
Rebecca is not alone, in speaking to the Guardian, Emma Kirby, a University of New South Wales professor of sociology, shares, “we carry this assumption that caring for your parents is the most normal, safe dynamic but this paints over instances of often decades-long abuse.”
“There’s a lot of reliving of old triggers and traumas and old arguments or positioning or repositioning, which is really difficult.”
Helen*, an obstetrician, now cares for her parents as well. She too only came to realise that her upbringing was abusive recently. She shares how her older bullying brother would have praise heaped on him, and she would receive relentless negative criticism.
Speaking to the Guardian she recalls, “every day for as long as I can remember, he [brother] told me how fat, stupid and ugly I was. He hit me a lot as well. When I told my mother, she said, ‘You’re too sensitive, that’s what brothers do.’ My mum doesn’t do emotions, she’s not affectionate.”
The conflicted feelings, the mess of societal expectations, and wanting to believe the best and having care-responsibility impact life and finances have all happened for Helen too. Work opportunities have come up in other states but she has felt the need, as the eldest daughter, as someone who wants to do ‘the right thing’, to forego those opportunities.
She bravely names the area of grey that thousands and thousands of Australian women are having to tackle, navigating profoundly complicated past traumas, current expectations and conscience, in how to care for parents.
“I can’t leave them, I love them, they did the best they could … they didn’t set out to be sh*tty parents,” she says, herself alone and without a robust support team.
“But it’s complicated, they really did some f*cking damage.”
Advocates say there is a dangerous and draining elephant in the room that needs to be removed, guilt. Over decades of societal and cross-religious expectations, the expectation to care for parents is strong. In many cases this is a beautiful, healthy and safe dynamic for all involved but the truth must be recognised, and resources made available, for the circumstances where that could not be further from a carer’s reality.
Sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists have all started to see concurrently, particularly with the exponential wave of seniors in Australia ageing into needing care, that there will be increasing situations where adult children should not be caring for ageing parents. Whether due to past trauma, toxicity, past and current abusive behaviour, the conversation they say, in society, in government, in funding for health and aged care, must acknowledge that in some cases, it is not safe for adult children to be looking after their parents.
The problem Kirby says, is that there is a pervasive sense of guilt when an adult child is navigating feelings of not feeling safe to take on caring responsibilities. She and other professionals see this time and time again, the sense of shame and doing ‘wrong’ by parents, by society, by their siblings.
She says, “they will feel that that says something about them as a person, regardless of how their parents may have treated them, regardless of how complicated or difficult that relationship is.”
When it comes to who has to make the “sacrifice”, Kirby points to what the research shows, society and family expectations have heaped pressure on predominantly women to adjust their lives, “there are a lot of assumptions that almost funnel certain people into those obligations.”
Gery Karantzas is a professor of psychology at Deakin University, he is frank when it comes to what forces are at play for adult carers and parents, and their very real consequences. The filial obligation, that is, an adult child’s understanding of duty to step up and care for a parent, is a powerful factor in Australia, but it also has other results. He says it can make care an unsafe burden on particular people in the family, a feeling of being trapped in a relationship that has already been unhealthy and damaging.
“[A carer] can feel that they [must] engage in more self-sacrifice, they can experience their own mental health difficulties around that.”
He names what has happened for women clearly, “pretty much it’s the eldest daughter who gets [the job].”
Kathy is a woman who looked after her abusive mum for years. She generously shares that there must be space to have conversations and feel what you need to feel, even if society doesn’t know what to do with it.
In conversation with the Guardian, she shares that from a mother who would repeatedly say, “‘what have you done? You’re so fat’”. The time of cheer would follow a pattern, “after that, through the Christmas holidays, it would be ‘no potatoes for you’ or, ‘You shouldn’t go to that party until you’ve lost weight’”. It was not due to society’s expectations to care for her mother that made her accept care-giving..
“Caring for her was more about my own sense of self and my own value system.”
Experts share that when seeing another person go through what you’re going through, to have your experiences voiced without shame, guilt or fear, there is a powerful exchange of validity and permission. This is why stories like Rebecca’s, Kathy’s and Helen’s are critical.
Kathy shares what is not easily talked about, to honour and highlight what thousands of people in Australia, predominantly women, have felt and should feel ok to feel. When her mum passed away, she was able to finally, “get out of there.” She felt a pressure lift.
“I was driving out of the town and I have never ever felt such an enormous sense of lightness, this responsibility, it just isn’t mine any more. I don’t have to be a party to any of this rubbish, I’m totally free.”
For Rebecca, navigating to a better place in caring for her father has meant putting up boundaries to get outside and ‘fill her cup’.
She has worked with psychologists to settle her feelings of exhaustion and to stop dismissing her feelings, so she can honour what she’s going through. Outside help has supported her to feel empowered to make choices that mean her tank of caring is filled up enough.
Rebecca also has realised that she cannot do it alone, she has asked her children to step up with care, to share the ‘sacrifice’ around. When she wanted to go on a trip with friends to a remote and beautiful place in Australia, she asked her daughter to relocate back to the family home for a few days. She didn’t know if her daughter would say yes, she didn’t want to put the same obligation on her that she had felt herself. She gently asked her daughter if she’d think about it.
Her daughter said yes, freely and happily, and Rebecca learned that with time, gentleness and openness she could ask others to partner in the work of caring for her dad.
She has also felt more empowered to step away from her dad needing to rely on her emotionally and frequently. When she sees her dad starting to demand care only on his terms, she has put up boundaries, inviting him into a conversation, that as they are both in the care relationship she would like him to hear her voice too. Boundaries, she has found, can be put up, to help safeguard her ability to care for her dad in the long-run; They are valid and directly involved in caring for him sustainably.
Support for carers is vital. For government, for society, for health and age-care networks, there is work to be done to provide carers, predominantly women, with the opportunity to raise their fears through clear, accessible and safe channels. For adult-children who choose, without coercion, to care for complicated and difficult parents, support must be developed to guide them in shaping that care. Health-networks must be made robust, with accessible outside support at the ready for carers, to partner in creating frameworks and boundaries that safeguard everyone in the relationship.
Advocates and carers invite a narrative shift, for society to hold space for, and support, carers navigating complicated and weighty relationships with their parents, and the possible care that follows.
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
