Most of us will either be a caregiver or need care at some point in our lives. If we’re lucky, giving or needing care happens later in life, as in the common (but still incredibly stressful) scenario of a middle-aged adult sandwiched between raising children and looking after aging parents. But what happens when becoming a care provider happens earlier in life? Sixty percent of first-time caregivers in the U.S. are currently millennials or Gen Zers, and as Jennifer N. Levin explains in Generation Care: The New Culture of Caregiving, young caregivers experience stressors specific to their age and life experience. Building a career, finding a romantic relationship or deciding to have children are formative chapters of adult life that can be radically altered by the experience of caregiving.
Levin’s own experience as a 32-year-old caregiver for her father forms the basis for this necessary and useful book, as does the material she’s gathered from her online support community, Caregiver Collective. When Levin’s father was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, she was thrown into the deep end. She was consumed with fear, her life “a disjointed hybrid of ‘single-woman problems’ and geriatric care.” Feeling isolated and alone, she wrote an article about what she was going through for Cosmopolitan, and to her surprise, millennial readers responded in droves that they were in the same position: struggling with burnout and desperate for relief.
Levin notes that younger caregivers are a diversely gendered group, with more men providing care than in generations past. Peer groups and support networks for caregivers have historically been aimed at an older audience (often women in their 50s and 60s). Caregiver Collective invited millennials (and Gen X- and Gen Zers) to share resources and support. Generation Care builds on this with advice and strategies for millennial caregivers by millennial caregivers. Using anecdotes, data and science to analyze the experience of millennial caregiving, Levin has penned a handbook and a survival manual. She also explores how the emotional, psychological and financial impact of early caregiving is impacted by the millennial generation’s experience of economic recessions and the COVID-19 pandemic. Levin reminds her readers that caregiving is not only about direct hands-on care; providing long-distance medical and financial assistance to a family member also qualifies.
“I know you are physically exhausted and emotionally depleted,” Levin writes in the book’s introduction, “but I hope you recognize you are part of a movement with heart and connection at its very core.” Generation Care is both a useful resource for anyone negotiating the demands of caregiving and an eye-opening take on the generational shifts occurring in health care.
