An estimated 22 to 26 million American adults currently provide care for family members or friends, most of them older people, who need help with daily activities; more than half of those caregivers have jobs. Many employees reduce their hours or stop working, and it may be years before they fully return to the work force, studies indicate.

“There’s no doubt that juggling the two can be very difficult,” says Douglas Wolf, professor emeritus of public administration and international affairs and faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute. 

Paid family leave might help workers providing care for the elderly. When California adopted paid leave, which took effect in 2004, residency rates at nursing homes declined by about 11 percent, Wolf found in a co-authored study. 

Although the study could not establish the reason, Wolf speculated that “the change in the law induced people to stay on the job, but they took enough time off to keep their parents out of a nursing home.”

Read more in the New York Times article, "The Quiet Cost of Family Caregiving."