We Lost the Village: Why Modern Caregiving Feels Impossible (And What We Can Build Instead)

Sarah’s (name changed for privacy) mother fell on a Tuesday afternoon.

By Wednesday morning, Sarah had booked a red-eye from Seattle to Tampa, arranged emergency time off work, found someone to watch her kids, and braced herself for weeks of coordinating medical appointments, insurance claims, and home modifications.

All of it from a thousand miles away.

And entirely alone.

Her grandmother, by contrast, broke her hip in 1982 in the same small Pennsylvania town where three generations of family had always lived.

Within hours, Sarah’s mother and two aunts had gathered.

Neighbors brought meals.

The woman next door checked in daily.

A cousin who was a nurse stopped by after her shift.

The care was imperfect and sometimes chaotic, but it was shared.

It was visible.

It was assumed.

What happened between then and now?

We tend to describe the caregiving crisis as one of resources: not enough money, time, or services.

But beneath the logistical overwhelm lies a deeper rupture: we dismantled the informal support systems that once made family caregiving survivable.

In our pursuit of progress, mobility, and personal freedom, we lost…

The Village.

Adult children caring for aging parents are now carrying the cost.

The question isn’t whether modernity brought benefits.

Of course it did.

But it also required sacrifices we barely understood at the time.

It’s worth asking whether we can rebuild something of what we lost before the weight collapses the people holding it.

For most of human history, caregiving wasn’t an isolated task. It was part of the daily rhythm of community life.

Extended families lived within reach of one another.

When someone needed help, responsibility spread across grandmothers, aunts, siblings, grown children, neighbors, and community members who understood that today’s caregiver would likely become tomorrow’s care recipient.

Don’t get me wrong…this wasn’t an idyllic past.

These arrangements brought their own pressures, especially for women whose labor was expected. Privacy was limited, and family dynamics could be suffocating.

But these systems shared the load.

No single person carried everything.

A daughter managing her father’s declining health in 1950 might coordinate with her sister down the street,

Rely on her mother to watch the grandchildren,

Ask a teenage son to run errands,

And receive hot meals from church members who saw caregiving as a communal responsibility.

The work was still hard, still gendered, and often unfair.

But it was witnessed and distributed.

The caregiving commons operated on proximity, mutual obligation, and the understanding that care was everyone’s eventual concern. It made the unbearable, though still difficult, doable.

Now imagine Sarah’s situation: her nearest sibling is in Austin, TX. Her brother lives back east in Boston.

Meanwhile her mom’s neighbors, while kind, are overwhelmed with their own lives.

Her mom’s once-active church has dwindled in membership. Extended family is scattered across states and time zones.

Sarah is alone not by chance, but by design.

The erosion of caregiving support didn’t happen accidentally. It grew out of societal choices, often made in the name of opportunity and self-determination.

Postwar America placed the nuclear family at the center: two parents, a few children, a home of their own, and distance from extended relatives.

What was sold as freedom often became isolation.

The nuclear family has never been structurally capable of absorbing the care needs of aging parents.

Yet it became the default expectation.

For decades, leaving home was framed as ambition. College, career moves, and economic opportunity pushed families farther apart.

Americans now live an average of 18 miles from their mothers, but the reality is far more skewed. In fact many live hundreds…even thousands of miles away.

Distance that opens doors also closes the door on shared care.

As women entered the workforce (no-doubt an essential and overdue shift) society failed to redistribute care work. Paid labor was added on top of unpaid caregiving.

The burden once held (often unfairly) by stay-at-home women did not disappear; it simply fell onto working women who already carried full workloads.

Elder care became the breaking point.

As families dispersed, elder care shifted to professional settings: nursing homes, assisted living, memory care.

These institutions can be essential, but they also allowed society to distance itself from daily caregiving.

The elderly became physically and socially separate from the rest of life, weakening intergenerational connection.

Modern life equates needing help with weakness. Aging parents avoid “being a burden.” Adult children try to manage everything alone. Neighbors hesitate to step in.

We’ve normalized isolation as personal strength, even when it harms everyone involved.

These shifts didn’t make us uncaring.

They made us modern.

But modernity brought costs we are now forced to confront.

The fallout isn’t theoretical. It shows up daily in the lives of millions of adult children trying to care for aging parents without the village that once made it possible.

AARP reports that more than half of family caregivers experience high emotional stress, and nearly half feel significant physical strain.

Behind those numbers are real people: the daughter who hasn’t slept through the night, the son who uses his vacation days for medical appointments, the caregiver fantasizing about escape while drowning in guilt.

Caregiving behind closed doors makes its toll invisible. What remains unseen remains unaddressed.

Facilities can provide essential services, but relying solely on institutions often leaves families with guilt, fear, and impossible decisions.

Many adult children know their parent needs care they cannot provide, yet they also know facility staffing and quality vary widely.

They end up trapped between inadequate options.

Despite decades of warnings about the aging population, there are no universal caregiving stipends, no reliable leave protections, and no consistent infrastructure to replace the village we lost.

Policies have not kept pace with demographics.

The message to caregivers is clear:

You’re on your own.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The caregiving village didn’t disappear because people stopped caring. It disappeared because the structure that supported it dissolved.

Structure can be rebuilt, not by returning to the past but by creating intentional communities of care in the present.

No single intervention will solve the crisis.

Rebuilding support requires layers: personal, community, and policy.

Small groups of caregivers can share respite, resources, and emotional support. Technology can help people connect by geography or care needs, but the core is human presence.

Co-housing, ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units), and multigenerational neighborhoods offer ways to bring families closer without sacrificing independence.

Other countries are innovating in this space.

For example, Germany’s Wohnen für (Mehr) Generationen initiative has supported dozens of multigenerational housing projects that bring households of all ages together with shared spaces and mutual support structures, and similar co-housing models across Europe are reimagining how living environments can embed care and connection into daily life.

Caregiving should be recognized as a public good.

That means protected leave, financial support for caregivers, community education, and messaging that frames interdependence as strength rather than weakness.

Apps and platforms can facilitate support networks, coordinate shared tasks, and match caregivers with peers.

Tech should amplify human connection…not replace it.

None of these ideas alone can restore what we lost. But together, they can help us build new forms of caregiving support that match the world we live in now.

Modernity gave us longer lives, greater mobility, and broader opportunity. It also took something essential: the shared caregiving fabric that once held families together.

The village wasn’t perfect.

But it was there.

It made the load bearable.

Today’s adult children are among the first generations to navigate elder care almost entirely alone and among the last who still remember what shared caregiving looked like.

We can’t reverse history. But we can ask new questions:

What would a caregiving village look like for you?

Who would be in it?

What might it make possible?

And what’s stopping you from beginning that work today?

💬 Want to stay connected?
I welcome media inquiries, partnership ideas, or personal notes from fellow caregivers building a new kind of village.
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