Caregiving efforts are excluding Gen Z and millennials

Jannexy Reyes is counting down the days to summer. But unlike most of her peers, the 22-year-old isn’t looking forward to sunny happy hours and summer Fridays. As a full-time caregiver to her 10- and 12-year-old sisters, “summer vacation” means just one thing: more responsibility.

Life permanently changed for Reyes in November 2019, when her father suffered a series of heart attacks that left him incapable of resuming an active caregiving role in her and her sisters’ lives. Overnight, Reyes went from being a daughter and an older sister to a caregiver. As the recent college grad juggles those expectations, she’s simultaneously launching her career, searching for her place in a workforce that doesn’t quite know how to support a caregiver like her.

“It's not very common for somebody my age to be a caregiver,” Reyes says. “I usually can't relate to many people, and can't talk about it with many people.”

Reyes and her mother juggle caregiving duties, arranging their respective work schedules around the girls’ school and activities. For Reyes, this means primarily working from home, having the flexibility to take days off if one of her sisters gets sick, missing out on in-office networking opportunities — and keeping this part of her life separate from her work world.

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“It's something that I try not to talk about in the workplace because I'm just starting out,” she says. “I want to remove as much bias as possible from employers and keep them from being like, ‘I don’t want to hire her because she's a caregiver,’ or, ‘she'll have issues with school when they're sick.’ So I try not to share.”

While Reyes may feel alone in her caregiving role, she’s got plenty of company. Twenty percent of caregivers are new to the role, and 60% of them are Gen Z or millennials, according to a survey from Embracing Careers. Of those young caregivers, 25% were thrust into the role during the pandemic. And yet, most caregiving benefits don’t take this demographic into consideration.

“The makeup of families has changed so much, and caregiving is not just elder care anymore,” says Sara MacDonald, vice president of clinical operations at caregiving platform Family First. “We are parents with children who have medical, mental health and neurodevelopment diagnoses. We have parents with medical conditions, and on their way to aging themselves. We have spouses who have chronic illnesses, new life-altering diagnoses or even mental health conditions.”

MacDonald first became a caregiver at 24, when her 5-year-old son was diagnosed with social communication disorder, ADHD, mood disorder and anxiety. Around the same time, her father was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

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“Caregiving at a young age was confusing and I felt like I was carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she says, now 39. “Being a young caregiver who also worked in healthcare, I always felt like the go-to person for family and friends, even though I was carrying quite a full plate with my son.”

While both MacDonald and Reyes became caregivers at a young age, today, the support available to them varies. Reyes, for example, would never qualify for any parental or family benefits, like leave, provided by her company, even though that flexibility would help support her and her family. At a time when companies are taking a more focused interest in supporting caregivers, Reyes still feels overlooked.

“The type of language that [companies] use has always frustrated me a little bit,” Reyes says. “Because I'm not a parent, but I'm still a guardian and a caregiver.”

Changing that perception will take an active effort from employers to be more inclusive in their caregiving benefits, according to Nicole Brackett, care delivery and education manager for Homewatch CareGivers. This means turning to technology and social networking to advertise job listings and promote the caregiving industry; making an effort to understand different generations and how they think, act, and what they want; and outlining career paths so new hires understand their growth opportunities, despite caregiving responsibilities.

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“People tend to not identify as caregivers — they might just think they are helping out a family member or friend, but don't see it as caregiving,” Brackett says. “So when a company offers support, it should be to all employees who may need counseling and resources to cope with additional responsibilities in life.”

For Reyes, keeping her caregiving duties private is already affecting the way she views and approaches her own career and opportunities — even though she knows that her caregiving skill set makes her a more valuable employee in the end.

“I don't want it to be seen as unreliable, that I might miss work [to care for my sisters] — I want that to be embraced,” Reyes says. “A flexible schedule is not necessarily a bad thing, especially now. I hope that my career keeps growing, and that one day I'm able to provide fully for that so that my mom doesn't have to work anymore. My family is what motivates me to keep working.”