Sons, brothers and husbands. More men are now caregivers for aging relatives.

By Jillian Berman

Guys are stepping up to care for their parents and spouses as the nation gets older. They face unique struggles.

Lonnie Mathews thought he and his wife would be spending their golden years traveling the world together. They'd loved hiking the Great Wall of China and participating in 150-mile bike rides, and had shored up their finances to retire early. The couple dreamed about a Greek islands boat tour.

Instead, Mathews, 58, is dropping his wife off at an adult-daycare center three days a week and trying to help her complete daily tasks even though she doesn't recognize him as her husband. Since 2024, when her dementia accelerated, Mathews' wife hasn't been able to be left alone. He's with her unless she's at the daycare or with one of the couple's adult daughters.

Mathews, who lives in Pearland, Texas, balances teaching college accounting courses online with his caregiving responsibilities, though he had to scale back his financial-literacy nonprofit, Alliance Financial Ministries, when his wife's care needs accelerated.

He's grateful that he and his wife were conscientious about their finances, so he doesn't have to worry about downshifting his career or the costs of her care, Matthews said. He struggles to come to terms with the possibility he'll be playing this role for decades because Mathews' wife is currently in good physical shape. The couple takes 2-mile walks twice each day.

"How long am I going to be doing this?" Matthews said he wonders sometimes. "I don't want to sound like I don't want to do it - this is my calling." He said he's angry at God for allowing his wife's mental decline, noting that he used to look to his wife for moral clarity. "It's just hard seeing her like this. We had so many plans."

For generations, American families and society have assumed that caregiving, whether for children or older family members, would be done by women. But these days, millions of men are taking on the role.

About 45% of Americans providing unpaid eldercare are men, according to data released last year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When the National Alliance for Caregiving looked at the population providing unpaid care to an adult in 2004, the share of men doing the job was 39%. In 1997, the share of male caregivers for older adults was around 28%.

Experts say data and demographic trends indicate the number of men, like Mathews, caring for parents or spouses is likely to increase. Already, it appears that in younger generations, men make up a larger share of eldercare providers than in older generations. Now, with the oldest baby boomers turning 80 this year - an age when care needs increase - it's likely more Americans will be pulled into caring for aging loved ones regardless of gender.

"We expect this trend to continue because you have the baby boomer generation continuing to age without the systems to support them," said Nicole Jorwic, the chief program officer at Caring Across Generations, a caregiving-advocacy organization. "As we've seen more women entering the workforce, as we've seen more and more American families needing dual incomes to stay afloat, that responsibility has shifted and it's required more men to also be taking on the responsibility of care."

Despite their growing prevalence, men can face unique challenges in assuming this role. "Frankly, because they're not the majority, sometimes they get left out of the conversation," Jorwic said. "The more we can get men in particular to identify as caregivers, the more that they can find their community."

For Mathews, that's been hard. Aside from a friend of a friend, he said he hasn't found many people who can relate to the experience of watching his wife, a chemical engineer, struggle to understand her current reality.

"There are a couple of groups that I've kind of gone to, I'm a bit of a loner, it didn't work well for me," Mathews said. "I internalize and figure things out."

'Males tend to think differently and we have a different language'

When Reginald A. Lawson started caring for his mother with dementia more than a decade ago, he looked for people who could support him. He wanted to commiserate with others who knew what it felt like to listen closely in the middle of the night to the cameras and alarms he'd installed at her house and to keep up with her ever-changing understanding of reality.

Lawson, 71, found a local support group for people caring for loved ones with dementia. He quickly noticed that he was just one of two men in attendance.

Reginald A. Lawson noticed quickly that he was just one of two men in a local support group for caregivers of people with dementia.

"I realized a lot of wives were wishing their husbands were there and they weren't," he said. So Lawson, who lives in Upper Marlboro, Md., decided to start a support group specifically for male caregivers. "Males tend to think differently and we have a different language. There needs to be a different approach to get over their walls, their filters, their denials. The guys clam up."

At a recent virtual meeting of the support group, the men in attendance agreed. One noted that in other, mixed-gender support groups he attends, he sometimes worries about how offhand comments he makes will be perceived.

"If I say, 'Gosh, she's just driving me crazy,' some people think, 'Gosh, how insensitive,'" he said. Being in a conversation with only men, "gives you complete openness."

During the session, the men found solace in shared experiences of aging relatives with dementia, telling stories about how those in their care clogged the plumbing by using washcloths the wrong way and constantly searched for sweets. One member of the group shared a tidbit he picked up from an expert, who told him that a side effect of dementia and Alzheimer's is that taste buds change dramatically, meaning the only food that often tastes the same is sugar.

Another group member talked about struggling to do what Lawson calls "the dance" of dementia, or following a person with the disease into their reality. Multiple times throughout the session, one caregiver unwittingly demonstrated this dynamic when his wife kept interrupting the conversation off-screen to say she was going to church even though it was a Saturday afternoon.

They discussed more intense feelings, too. "I'm doing better, I haven't punched any walls lately," a caregiver for his wife said. "That hurts, so I don't do that no more."

Tension between paid work and caregiving

Rey Castuciano happened to be visiting his family in St. Louis a decade ago when his father had a stroke. Castuciano decided to stay for several weeks to support his mother while his father was in an intensive-care unit and a skilled nursing facility. His mother then asked Castuciano not to return to his home in Los Angeles and remain in St. Louis.

"It was like, what the heck?" said Castuciano, who worked in the biotech industry at the time. "I was at a point in my career when I saw a lot of upward trajectory." He'd been working for most of his 13-year career at a healthcare company in Southern California, and there were many opportunities in front of him. Castuciano had degrees from both the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, and had developed a professional network in the region.

Rey Castuciano moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis to care for his parents after his father suffered a stroke.

Still, Castuciano agreed to relocate to St. Louis for an unspecified amount of time. He'd grown up understanding the value of family supporting one another. Castuciano's parents came to the U.S. from the Philippines in the 1980s and built a new life for him and his sister. "It made sense for me to come out and help," he said.

At the outset, he believed his time in St. Louis would be temporary. Castuciano put all of his belongings in storage in L.A. After about a year, he realized the move had become permanent. He still lives in St. Louis.

For the first five or so years, the hours he spent - dispensing medications, managing medical appointments, bathing and dressing his dad and more - made it difficult to pursue a corporate career, particularly in a field like biotech, which is largely located in coastal America. Castuciano eventually found a way to work while simultaneously caring for his father, launching a nonprofit called Table Wisdom that connects foreign-born professionals with elderly U.S. adults for online conversations. The aim is to provide mentorship and English practice for the younger participants, and social interaction for the older adults.

Now, Castuciano lives 25 minutes away from his parents with his wife, whom he married about six years into his caregiving journey. He still spends roughly 10 to 15 hours each week managing his parents' care. Even after 10 years of helping his parents, Castuciano said he's adjusting to the idea that he's a caregiver.

He said the drive that pushed him earlier in his career has been redirected somewhere else, but it took years of practice and being surrounded by an older generation with wisdom to stop keeping score.

The tension between paid work and caring for a loved one is something that caregivers of all types experience, but it can be particularly acute for men, according to Brigid Schulte, journalist, author and director of the Better Life Lab at New America, a think tank.

Schulte and her team have been studying male caregivers through surveys, focus groups and reporting since 2019. When the team first began the research, it confronted a general assumption that men avoided caregiving work simply because they didn't want to be doing it, Schulte said. But Schulte's surveys and focus groups clearly showed that men yearned to contribute to care and share obligations equally with women.

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06-23-26 1001ET