If you've found yourself helping a loved one while juggling work, family, the rest of life's responsibilities, and maybe some distance to boot, you're not alone.
Many care givers feel stretched in ways those of previous generations did not.
Despite more professional services, better technology, and greater access to information, supporting a loved one through aging, illness, loss, or a major life transition often feels surprisingly difficult.
Families Have Changed
Consider what family support may have looked like a generation or two ago. Parents and adult children were often closer together; families were generally larger; one parent was more likely to be at home; and periods of dependency were usually shorter.
Today’s reality is different. Families are more mobile and can be more geographically spread out – especially those with higher incomes and education.
At the same time, more households are built around the schedules of two working adults. Among Canadian couple families with children under age 16, the share of dual-earner families nearly doubled between 1976 and 2015 - from 36% to 69%.
There are also fewer children available to share the work of supporting parents and other family members. Canada’s total fertility rate reached a record low of 1.33 children per woman in 2022 and has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 since the early 1970's. The last five years have seen the lowest annual fertility rates recorded since 1921.
And life expectancy is increasing – from 75 years for a Canadian newborn in 1980 to 82 years in 2024.
Taken together, these are largely positive developments. Longer lives, greater mobility, more opportunity for women in the labor market, and smaller families shaped by personal choice - all part of modern life. But they also change the practical math of caregiving: fewer nearby relatives, fewer siblings to share responsibility, less daytime flexibility, and more years of support.
Distance
When a crisis occurs, distance creates friction.
Simple tasks that could be handled in an afternoon while together, often require hours of arrangements, travel, phone calls, and coordination when there's a distance to overcome. Things as straightforward as attending a medical appointment, reviewing paperwork, inspecting a property, or helping with technology become significantly more complicated when family members are not nearby.
The emotional impact of this friction can also be significant. Many adult children carry a persistent sense that they should be doing more, even when they are already doing everything they reasonably can.
Coordinating Complexity
Another reality of modern life is that support systems have become more specialized.
A family physician, a lawyer, a banker, and perhaps an accountant, may have been the primary roles supporting families in the past (and present for many).
For affluent families, circumstances and financial resources can result in more support being necessary. A loved one's affairs may involve several properties, investment accounts, a corporate structure, private investments, family trusts, etc. These additional pieces come with additional specialist professional relationships: financial, legal, tax, real estate, and insurance.
When supporting a loved one through a difficult time, one needs to understand how things fit together, what information each professional needs, who has authority to act, etc. Specialist professionals may be highly capable, and genuinely care, though each typically focuses only on their piece of the puzzle.
As outlined in our white paper, the challenge is making sure the efforts of advisors and service providers come together in an integrated manner, and that nothing falls through the cracks. While expertise has become increasingly sophisticated, responsibility for connecting all the moving pieces generally remains with the individual or family.
Coordinating and integrating is challenging enough when all is well. When someone is struggling, this key responsibility can be difficult to execute well.
Admin
Related to the challenges of complexity and coordination is the reality of, as this paper describes it, "the office-type work involved in running a life": i.e., managing paperwork, schedules, dealings with institutions, etc.
Much of this work is unseen – and often falls on women. Research on household management takes this further, exploring the related mental workload of anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring what happens next.
These studies are not specifically about caregivers, though offer a useful framework for understanding the coordination required to manage a loved one’s affairs.
And then there is the reality of family caregivers as navigators and advocates contending with fragmented systems. All of this consumes significant time, energy, and often spirit.
Many caregivers discover that the hardest part is not making a particular decision. It is keeping track of dozens of small decisions, conversations, tasks, and follow-ups across multiple domains of a life.
It All Adds Up
Coordination challenges are easy to dismiss because they often appear to be small administrative problems. Individually, these seem manageable. Collectively, they can create stress, delay, and uncertainty. An email not returned. A phone call delayed. A document that sits unsigned. An appointment that needs to be rescheduled. A conversation that never quite happens.
Families can begin to feel overwhelmed even when substantial support is available. Frustration can build between siblings or family members who have different amounts of information, see a situation from a different perspective, or have different levels of capacity to contribute.
A Different Way to Think About Support
When families struggle to support a loved one, they often assume they need more information, more expertise, or more resources. Sometimes that is true, though often the greater challenges are coordination and integration.
Modern families are navigating longer lives, greater geographic dispersion, more specialized services, and increasingly complex systems. The task is no longer simply providing support. It is coordinating support.
If supporting a loved one feels harder than expected, it's likely not because anyone is falling short.
It may simply reflect the reality that modern life requires a level of coordination that previous generations rarely had to manage.
FAQs
What are some of the challenges of supporting a loved one during a difficult time in their life?
Supporting someone who is struggling can involve managing appointments, paperwork, property matters, coordination with several specialist advisors, companies and institutions, and ongoing follow-up—all alongside your own responsibilities. When family members live apart or have limited availability, connecting these pieces can become a substantial commitment. Patience is also important as brain fog can impact the attention, memory, concentration, and decision-making ability of your loved one while they are struggling.
How can I help if I don’t live nearby?
Begin by talking with your loved one about what support they would welcome. Some responsibilities, such as arranging appointments, researching options, and tracking follow-ups, can be handled remotely. Others need someone nearby. Agreeing on who will do what, and how updates will be shared, can make distance easier to manage without assuming you must handle everything yourself. Our Insights article on helping a parent after the death of a spouse addresses this topic in more detail.
Why is coordination still needed when professional advisors are involved?
Even when the right specialist advisors are in place, someone is generally required to coordinate their work and, often, support its execution. Different professionals have different responsibilities, information needs, and timelines. Coordination helps clarify next steps, keep the right people informed (with appropriate consent) and follow through on matters that cross between them.
What is a practical first step when everything feels overwhelming?
Start with a simple overview of what needs attention: outstanding tasks, upcoming appointments, key contacts, and unanswered questions. With your loved one’s involvement (and being sensitive to their emotional bandwidth), identify immediate priorities and agree on who will take each next step. A short, regularly updated, and prioritized list can be more useful than trying to solve every issue at once.
When might outside coordination support be helpful?
Support from a firm like Second Chair Partners may be worth exploring when follow-ups repeatedly stall, responsibilities are unclear, or the practical workload exceeds what your family can reasonably manage. We work directly with your loved one and you to help organize information, coordinate existing advisors and services, and keep agreed actions moving.
Sources:
Statistics Canada, Samuel MacIsaac, Yuri Ostrovsky, and Grant Schellenberg, Geographic proximity between adult children and their parents in Canada, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2025011/article/00002-eng.htm
National Library of Medicine, Matthijs Kalmijn, Long‐term trends in intergenerational proximity: Evidence from a grandchild design, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9286647/
Statistics Canada, The rise of the dual-earner family with children, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2016005-eng.htm
Statistics Canada, Claudine Provencher and Nora Galbraith, Fertility in Canada, 1921 to 2022, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2024001-eng.htm
Statistics Canada, Life expectancy and other elements of the complete life table, single-year estimates, Canada, all provinces except Prince Edward Island, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310083701&pickMembers%5B0%5D=1.1&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&pickMembers%5B2%5D=4.8&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1980&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2024&referencePeriods=19800101%2C20240101
Columbia Law School, Elizabeth F. Emens, Admin, https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1284&context=faculty_scholarship
Harvard Kennedy School, The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor, https://inequality.hks.harvard.edu/publications/cognitive-dimension-household-labor
BMJ Journals, Andrew Wister, Eireann O’dea, Barbara A Mitchell, Lun Li, and Laura Kadowaki, Roles and experiences of informal caregivers of older adults in community and healthcare system navigation: a scoping review, https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/12/e077641