Ellis / Guides
Caring for a parent while working full time
The job is not the hard part, and neither is the parent. It is the third thing — the calls, the forms, the errands — that has to happen between nine and five, when both the job and the parent expect you.
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Where the hours actually go
Keep a note for two weeks of every task and how long it took. Almost everybody who does this finds the same thing: the time is not in visiting, it is in administration, and most of it is a small number of recurring tasks that have to be done in office hours — the pharmacy, the doctor’s office, the insurer. That is what to attack.
What an employer can offer
- Flexible hours or a shifted day, which is often easier to agree than fewer hours
- Caregiver leave — eligible employees may have job-protected leave under federal law, and some employers offer more; ask what applies to you
- An employee assistance programme, which frequently includes eldercare referrals nobody knows about
- A conversation with your manager before it becomes an emergency, not after
You are very unlikely to be the first person at your employer to ask. Asking early is what keeps it a conversation rather than a crisis.
Move the office-hours calls off your calendar
- Pharmacy: synchronised refills, automatic refill, delivery — one call sets it up and removes a dozen
- Doctor: ask for the first or last appointment of the day, and use the office’s online booking where it exists
- A geriatric care manager for one paid hour can set up in an afternoon what takes a family months to discover
- Any task that recurs gets a named owner, even if the owner is a service
The rule: one category each
If there are siblings, split by category rather than by favour: one takes medicines, one takes appointments, one takes money. A shared note that everyone can see, and the parent’s own preferences about who does what, which are worth asking for.
Burnout is a workload problem, not a character flaw
Caring for a parent while working is two jobs, and nobody sustains two jobs indefinitely. Caregiver support groups exist for exactly this, respite care exists so that you can stop for a week, and your own doctor is a reasonable person to tell. None of it is admitting defeat.