Jennifer Skeeters
Center of Excellence Leader
In my work with leave and accommodation policy, I notice caregiving in a particular way. I see it in the requests employees make, and even more in the ones they never do.
One of the clearest pictures I have of elder caregiving workplace impact doesn't come from a leave file. It comes from my best friend. She and I are the same age and at the same stage of life, both recently empty nesters. This should be the chapter where she gets a little freedom back. Instead, her mother has dementia and now lives with her, and my friend provides all of her daily care. So much of what she decides now, professionally, personally, financially, is shaped by that caregiving. Her chapter is showing up nothing like the one she pictured.
She is not an outlier. In 2025, 63 million Americans, nearly one in four adults, were caring for an adult or child with a serious health condition or disability, and close to a third of them were also raising kids at the same time.¹ I am squarely one of those sandwich generation employees myself, with two kids in college on one side and an 80-year-old father on the other.
Elder caregiving doesn't behave like other leaves
Elder care support is a leave reason that many employers often tend to underestimate. When someone takes time for a new baby, it is usually a happy reason with advance notice, and people rally around them. Caring for a parent with Alzheimer's disease is different. It can be painful to talk about, and the employee often doesn't know exactly why they need to be out or for how long, which makes it a hard request to make. So a lot of the time, they don't make it and continue to carry the caregiver strain in the workplace. They fold the caregiving into their day instead, taking a call with a home aide over lunch or slipping out early, their mind always half somewhere else.
Nationally, 42% of working caregivers say caregiving has set their careers back.² And this kind of care rarely arrives as a single event with a clean recovery arc. It escalates over months or years, receding and returning without warning. Many caregivers eventually need leave of their own, once the strain catches up with their health. On the absence side, that is often the first time the employer sees it.
Where coverage fits, and where it doesn't
I believe in strong leave programs, and I know their limits. Elder caregiving workplace impact is a problem leave was never built to solve by itself, and long-term care coverage is one of the pieces that works alongside it.
It helps to be precise about how. A long-term care insurance policy generally covers the person who holds it, not an employee's mother or father.
So the value is not that it eases the caregiving your people are doing right now. The value is what it may make possible next time, including for your employees themselves. When the person who needs care has a plan in place, professional caregivers can carry out the hands-on daily work that a family member may not be trained or ready to handle. That can free the family's time for what matters most in that chapter: being present as a daughter or a son again, rather than a round-the-clock aide. In what may be a final chapter, that time is not something anyone gets back.
Where to start
A good place to begin is looking at your own workforce. Look at where your people sit in the caregiving cycle, since a Gen X-heavy population is likely living this today. Then consider long-term care planning for employees as one part of how you support them, next to the caregiving support and leave policies you already have. You don't need every answer before you start that conversation; you just need the willingness to start it early.
And this is not a distant hypothetical for them. Someone turning 65 today has almost a 70% chance of needing some form of long-term care in the years ahead.³ Most of the employees you are supporting through a parent's illness will one day stand on the other side of it.
Caregiving is only one lens through which to view long-term care insurance. There is more to the full picture, from how coverage protects retirement savings to how it fits your broader benefits. But this is the piece I would lead with, because it is already unfolding within your organization. Someone on your team got a hard phone call this week. The most useful question isn't whether caregiving is affecting your workforce. It is what you are giving people to plan with before it does.
¹ AARP and National Alliance for Caregiving, Caregiving in the U.S. 2025. https://www.aarp.org/press/releases/2025-07-24-new-report-reveals-crisis-point-for-americas-63-million-family-caregivers.html
² SHRM, Care and Careers: Navigating Caregiving and Work Responsibilities (2025). https://www.shrm.org/about/press-room/42--of-working-caregivers-report-career-challenges---new-shrm-re
³ Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, How Much Care Will You Need? https://acl.gov/ltc/basic-needs/how-much-care-will-you-need
