The Sandwich Generation Burnout Numbers Companies Can't Ignore

One report out this year keeps coming back to us. It's about the sandwich generation, people raising children while also caring for aging parents, and the numbers are hard to look away from. Nearly two thirds of working women in this position, 64%, screened as being at a breaking point, in a report from a caregiving-benefits company.¹

There's also a cost line in there that should get any employer's attention. Caregivers at high risk of burnout are running healthcare costs around two thirds higher than lower-risk members, roughly $1,000 a month against $600 per member. These figures come from the Family Health Index, a caregiving-benefits company's yearly report built from more than 19,200 assessments. The company's public page does not say who was assessed, how a breaking point is scored, or what period the cost figures cover. So they are not a survey of all working women, and a cost gap is a link, not proof of cause. Treat them as a signal, not the final word. It is still a fair prompt for employers: this may be a budget question, not only a feel-good one.

Wellness Built for the Wrong Shift

We bring this up because most corporate wellness programs we see are still built for a version of the employee that doesn't quite exist, someone whose life outside the office is basically a rest period between shifts. A step challenge or a lunchtime yoga class assumes the hard part of someone's day happens at their desk. For many people, the hardest part of the day starts the moment they leave the office and walks into a second, unpaid job coordinating a parent's medications or a child's school pickup.

You cannot recover from a workday inside a program that only sees the workday. If someone is carrying a real caregiving load at home, fifteen minutes of stretching between meetings is not going to touch the thing that's actually draining them. That doesn't mean workplace wellness is pointless. It means it has to widen its definition of what it's actually supporting.

A wellness program that only accounts for the hours someone is at their desk is measuring the wrong shift. The caregiving hours before and after work are often the ones doing the real damage, and they're invisible to almost every benefit built around office life.

Where Coaching Fits

We're not going to pretend a coaching program solves caregiving responsibilities themselves, that's not something movement or breathwork can fix. But recovery capacity is recovery capacity, wherever the depletion is coming from. Someone managing a parent's care and a child's schedule needs their nervous system regulation and their physical resilience just as much as, maybe more than, someone whose only stressor is deadlines. Building that capacity has to be part of how a company thinks about supporting the whole person, not just the one showing up to the 9am meeting.

If your wellness program hasn't asked what your employees are carrying outside the building, these numbers are a good reason to start asking. It is the first question we ask in our corporate wellbeing work.