63 Million People Are Being Told That Love Means Running on Empty
The average family caregiver in the United States is 51 years old.
That figure comes from a report published in July 2025 by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, and the rest of it is just as striking. Some 63 million Americans, about one adult in four, are now looking after a relative. That’s up 45% in ten years. Three in five are women. Seven in ten of those of working age also have a job. Nearly a third are in the “sandwich generation,” caring for an older adult and a child at once.
One in five says their own health is fair or poor because of it.
This is what the middle of life looks like for a very large number of people. And if they’re Christians, they’re often doing it with a particular sentence in their heads: love is sacrifice.
It’s a true sentence. It’s also a dangerous one when it’s the only one you’ve got.
Think about the caregiver who hasn’t had a day off in two years. She’s tired and short-tempered, and privately resentful, and ashamed of the resentment. When she looks to her faith for help she finds verses about laying down your life, and concludes that the tiredness is her failure. A better Christian would be doing this gladly.
The problem is that the teaching she’s leaning on leaves something out.
The command is to love your neighbour as yourself, and it takes for granted that there’s a self to do the loving. The Gospels show Jesus leaving crowds who still wanted things from him, to go off alone, more than once. There were still sick people in the village when he left. If that had been neglect, the writers would hardly have recorded it so often.
So the choice I’d put to the caregiver isn’t between herself and the person she looks after. It’s whether she wants to give out of some kind of supply or out of nothing at all. Care given out of exhaustion gets worse over time. The carer becomes brittle and mistakes creep in, and she stops being able to be warm. She’s present, but the person being cared for doesn’t get much of her. In the end something breaks, and usually it’s her health.
A carer who takes Tuesday afternoons off hasn’t started loving her mother less. She’s making it possible to still be doing this in three years.
It’s hard to believe that when you’re in it, because rest feels like stealing from someone who needs you. But nobody is helped when the carer collapses.
Diane Cooper gives a chapter of Faith for the Middle of Life to this, under the title “Loving Others Without Losing Yourself.” In it she has a line I keep coming back to: sacrifice without boundaries is not love; it is a fire that consumes the house it was meant to warm.
Where’s the line, though? How do you tell a boundary that protects your ability to love from one that’s just a respectable excuse for doing less?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN2954Y6
#Faith, #Caregiving, #Boundaries, #ChristianLiving, #SandwichGeneration, #Midlife, #SelfCare, #Love, #EmotionalHealth, #Family, #DianeCooper
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