Millions of Americans provide care to others each day, supporting aging parents, young and adult children and grandchildren, spouses and partners, siblings, and other friends and relatives. While much research has been done to try to enhance our understanding of the needs and experiences of caregivers, data collection processes are inconsistent
across caregiver populations.
NCFS has leveraged large, national datasets to construct a detailed profile of different types of caregivers, highlighting both current knowledge and key gaps. In this brief, we present data and profile grandparents as caregivers, and care recipients, and highlight the changing status and roles of this important cohort.
Highlights from the brief include:
- Grandparents living with and responsible for grandchildren with no parent present have emerged as a particularly vulnerable group and are worse off on many indicators com-pared to those responsible for grandchildren with a parent present.
- The proportion of grandparents living with and not responsible for grandchildren has increased over the past 12 years, potentially indicating increasing strain among “sandwich generation” caregivers.
The findings emphasize the need to move forward with the strategies to provide employment, financial, and other key supports to grandparent and kin caregivers articulated in the 2022 National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers.
The full report is available to be downloaded. Contact us at caregiving@pitt.edu with any questions or for further discussion.