I've seen this comparison a few times in the past few months, always from well-meaning people: "Elder caregiving is like childcare." I thought it was worth jotting down my perspective on the topic.
We keep trying to solve eldercare at work like it's childcare. It's not.
Sure, it has the same demographic behind it (GenX and Millennials), and the same headline (caregiving is hard), but elder caregiving has a completely different structural reality. Here are 10 reasons why.
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There's no end date. Childcare has a finish line. Kids grow up. Eldercare starts at a different time for everyone, has no graduation ceremony, and the trajectory is toward more need, not less.
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The care recipient used to be in charge. You're making decisions for someone who spent 70+ years making their own. It's not just logistics. Wrapped up in that is grief, guilt, and identity loss for everyone involved.
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It arrives as a crisis, not a calendar event. Most childcare is planned. Eldercare is triggered by a fall, a diagnosis, or a 2am hospital call. Families are making enormous decisions while emotionally depleted.
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The decision involves a committee. Childcare? Up to the parents. Elder caregiving? Siblings across three different states, each with their own history, their own grief, their own opinion. Sounds like fun, right?
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It's their money, not yours. Childcare comes out of your paycheck, and it's even tax advantaged. Funds for caregiving often come from a parent's savings, or Long-Term Care insurance, especially for Senior Living. This adds layers of guilt, family tension, and sometimes conflict over inheritance that has no equivalent in childcare.
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Fragile infrastructure. New parents have apps, resource groups, friends and neighbors, backup care. Caregivers have a fragmented mess of EAP directories, referrals, and "resources" with little practical help.
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The invisible employee problem. Parents are celebrated. Caregivers are terrified of being seen as "distracted." Your most experienced leaders are drowning in silence, managing doctor appointments, hospital visits, and coordination during their second shift.
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It gets harder, not easier. Every year of childcare, kids gain independence. Every year of eldercare, the care needs escalate, the complications compound, and the stress increases.
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There's no roadmap. Parenting has a rough playbook of milestones: walking, words, solid food. For elder caregiving, regardless of the need (dementia, mobility loss, illness), it's almost always happening for the first time for the family doing it.
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Geography makes it harder. Children live with their parents. Many adult children live far away from their elderly parents. That makes each act of caregiving a coordination struggle, or requires adult children to spend time and money traveling in to help.
The benefits industry spent 20 years building helpful, supportive childcare infrastructure. Worth every penny.
Here's the reality heading into 2026: the demographic surge in elder caregiving, and the Senior Living decisions that come with it, is impacting your workforce right now. Most benefits programs are unprepared for the speed of its arrival.
SHRM's 2025 Employee Benefits Survey put a number on it: only 13% of employers offer an elder care referral service, a figure that's stayed flat for two years running.
Your GenX and Millennial employees deserve better than a directory or a referral, and so do their parents. There's loads of room for innovation in this space, and it's exactly where Petunia lives: a decision management platform built specifically for Assisted Living and Memory Care, not a generic caregiving directory trying to stretch to fit it.