Caring for a parent feels like a second job because basically, it is

The data on what family caregiving actually costs — in time, money, and mental load.

There's a moment many adult children describe the same way. It usually happens on a Tuesday afternoon — mid-meeting, or school pickup, or somewhere equally inconvenient — when the phone rings and everything shifts. A fall. A confusing diagnosis. A neighbour calling to say Mum didn't pick up her mail.

And from that moment, without any formal agreement, interview, or onboarding process, you have a second job.

The hours are real

Research from the US, where caregiver data is more granular than almost anywhere else, found that family carers spend an average of 25 hours per week on caregiving tasks. That's not 25 hours at a nursing home. That's 25 hours of phone calls with specialists, coordinating transport, managing medications, researching residential options, doing the laundry, and lying awake worrying.

In Australia, the numbers tell a similar story. There are now 3 million informal carers — the vast majority of them managing care alongside paid work and their own family responsibilities. Fifty-nine percent report financial stress. Fifty-four percent report high or very high psychological distress.

These aren't statistics about people who are struggling. They're statistics about people who are doing something genuinely difficult, without adequate support, and often without recognition that what they're doing constitutes work at all.

At an individual level, the average carer loses an estimated $392,500 in lifetime income by age 67

The unpaid invoice

Economists have tried to put a number on it. One widely cited Australian estimate puts the replacement value of all informal care at $77.9 billion per year — roughly what it would cost to replace every hour of unpaid family care with a paid professional. For context, that's more than double what the federal government spends on the formal aged care system.

At an individual level, the average carer loses an estimated $392,500 in lifetime income by age 67 — through reduced hours, career interruptions, and foregone promotions. Seventy percent of caregivers are also employed, and more than a quarter shift to part-time work to manage the demands. These are not small sacrifices.

Why it's so exhausting

The hours are one thing. The cognitive load is another.

Caring for an elderly parent typically means holding an enormous amount of information in your head at once: medication schedules, upcoming appointments, what the GP said last week, whether the ACAT assessment has come through yet, what your sibling thinks, what your parent wants, and what you think is actually best.

There is no handover at the end of the day. There is no HR department. There is no performance review that acknowledges what you've given.

And critically, for most families, there is no system. The coordination happens across text threads, memory, and goodwill — which works until it doesn't.

The case for treating it like a job

Here's an uncomfortable reframe: if caring for your parent is effectively a part-time job, it deserves the infrastructure of one. That means documentation. It means shared visibility across everyone involved. It means clarity about who is responsible for what, so the same person isn't fielding every call, attending every appointment, and making every decision alone.

Research consistently shows that when care responsibilities are shared across a family, carers report lower stress, better wellbeing, and — importantly — better outcomes for the person being cared for.

The hardest part isn't usually the caring itself. It's the coordination. And that's a solvable problem.

Ready to share the load? CarePoster gives families a single shared space to coordinate care — tasks, appointments, medications, and documents. Free to try at careposter.com

Photo by Jsme MILA