Caring for a Parent With Parkinson's: What Adult Children and Young Carers Need to Know
Caring for a mother or father with Parkinson's disease changes your twenties, thirties, and beyond. Practical and emotional guidance for adult children and young carers — plus a global community that gets it.
When a parent is diagnosed with Parkinson's disease or Lewy body dementia, the role reversal doesn't arrive all at once. It arrives in small increments: a phone call about medication timing, a hospital appointment you take off work for, a night you don't sleep.
What makes caring for a parent different
- You are often building your own life at the same time — study, career, relationships, children.
- Friends your age rarely understand, which makes the loneliness sharper.
- Family roles get renegotiated, sometimes unfairly, between siblings.
- Grief starts early and has nowhere socially acceptable to go.
Things that genuinely help
- Write down what you actually do in a week. Invisible work becomes shareable work.
- Ask siblings for specific tasks, not general help.
- Keep one thing in your life that is entirely yours.
- Find peers your own age who are caring for a parent too.
You are allowed to have your own life
PiaPia's founder, Aoi Sugimoto, has been a family caregiver since the age of eight and is now a Parkinson's researcher. Many of our members are adult children and young carers — from students to people in their sixties still caring for a parent.
Membership is free, and any country and any age is welcome.
You don't have to carry caregiving alone.
Join the PiaPia community — free