We have more freedom than ever to decide what our families will look like. We can marry or stay single, have children or remain child-free. The old expectations around marriage and parenthood have loosened for both women and men. Yet one family responsibility still arrives with little choice: sooner or later, often while we are still juggling our own careers, children and commitments, many of us find ourselves caring for ageing parents.
For many families, the change happens slowly. If parents remain healthy, active and independent into old age, the question of care may never fully arise. But when they can no longer manage on their own, the responsibility usually passes to the next generation. And although we often talk about “children” caring for elderly parents, in practice that responsibility still falls most often on daughters. Women are not only more likely to care for their own mothers and fathers, but frequently find themselves looking after their husband’s parents as well.
For many of these women, life begins to shrink around the needs of someone else. It is hard to “choose yourself”, as psychologists often advise, when your days are shaped by the exhausting and deeply personal realities of caring for a person who can no longer care for themselves. The question is what support – from society and from the state – exists for those carrying this invisible work. Because when caring for our parents becomes a responsibility we cannot step away from, many families are left to navigate it largely on their own.
Readers’ stories
Olha, 52:
“I’m a freelancer, so I work from home. Every morning I wake up and catch myself thinking: If only I could sit down and work now… I’m a morning person, and those early hours are when I’m at my most productive. But most days, that ‘now’ never comes.
Before I can even open my laptop, there are things that need to be done. I have to help Mum with her hygiene, take her outside for a walk, keep her company, and make sure she eats. Feeding her is the biggest task of all.
Almost every day, I go to the market or the shop. Carrying heavy bags has become too difficult for me, and I don’t have a car — although recently I did get a kravchuchka, one of those little shopping trolleys. When I get home, there is more work waiting: I cook, blend Mum’s food, and wash the dishes. By the time breakfast is over, it feels as though lunch has already arrived.
I usually manage to get to my computer only in the afternoon, already exhausted and often angry. Then I work late into the night, knowing that the next morning everything will start all over again.
But there is no one else to look after Mum. It all falls on me — I’m her only daughter.”
Emma, 65:
“My sister made her position clear from the start: ‘Do what you want, but I’m not going to look after Mum. If it’s too much for you, put her in a care home.’ And then she moved abroad.
I have a husband, children and grandchildren of my own. Once, when Mum was in hospital, the doctors asked her about her grandchildren — whether she had any. She replied: ‘No, I don’t. If I had any, we would have eaten them by now.’
The doctors were horrified. I had to explain that Mum was reliving memories of her childhood, the years of the Holodomor. That probably tells you everything you need to know about her condition: she had severe dementia.
There were times when I had to ask for time off work, but I felt ashamed to explain the real reason. How exactly do you tell your employer that the entire floor at home is covered in faeces and that you can’t leave the house until you have cleaned it up?
That went on for ten years. Ten years of caring for my mother. Even now, I don’t know how I managed not to break under the weight of it all.”
Nina, 73:
“I belong to the generation that used to say: ‘Thank you to our parents for letting us get an education.’ And we didn’t mean that our parents had used connections or pulled strings to get us into university. We meant something else: that they had managed to stay alive and independent long enough for us to finish our studies.
I was born in the 1950s, while our parents’ generation — those born in the 1920s and 1930s — went through unimaginable hardships. There was famine, there was war… They aged quickly, fell ill, and their health often deteriorated much earlier than it should have. Some of my university classmates never made it to graduation because, at just 18 or 20 years old, they had to leave their studies behind and take care of their parents.
By the time my mother died, and later my father, I was already middle-aged. For my brother and me, as harsh as it may sound, it was actually a kind of luck — because at least we had already had the chance to build our careers and establish ourselves as professionals.”
There are countless stories like these. And the examples above do not even take into account the impact of the war – long before the full-scale Russian invasion, Ukrainian women who were themselves ageing, often with their own health problems and vulnerabilities, were already taking on the role of caregivers for older relatives.
The Russian-Ukrainian war has only piled another layer of suffering onto an already painful reality. Chronic stress, fear and the constant strain of living through uncertainty take their toll, accelerating ageing and deepening a problem that was already there. The scale of this challenge is impossible to ignore – but to understand it properly, we need to look beyond individual experiences and examine the figures behind them.
Exactly how many people need care?
We do not know exactly how many Ukrainian families have found themselves caring for elderly relatives – and we are unlikely to know the true scale of the issue until the war ends, displaced people begin returning home (at least some of them), and a national population census is finally carried out.
What we do know is that the number of people who may need care is already significant. According to Oleksandr Hladun, Deputy Director of the Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, around 29 million people currently remain in the territories under Ukrainian control.
Among them are approximately 9.5–10 million people aged over 60, according to various estimates and available data, including projections covering the period up to 2026. Ukraine also has around 3.4–3.5 million people with disabilities as of the end of 2025 and beginning of 2026. The full-scale war has added roughly 600,000 people to this number compared with early 2022, when the figure stood at around 2.8 million. More than 130,000 of those people are veterans who acquired disabilities as a result of combat.
At the same time, the picture is more complicated than the numbers alone suggest. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, a significant share of new disability cases recorded in 2025 involved people of working age. Yet the number of older people living with disabilities remains high, too, as health problems accumulate over a lifetime.
In other words, we have a general idea of how many older people are out there and how many people have disabilities – but we do not know to what extent these two groups overlap. We also do not know how many people who need daily care have never gone through the official process of obtaining disability status.
What we do know is that the financial support available to caregivers is limited. A non-professional caregiver looking after a person with a Group I disability can receive around 4,323 UAH (approx. $100) in 2026 – the equivalent of 50% of the minimum wage. If the caregiver is themselves a pensioner, their additional payment is 3,209 UAH (approx. $75). Those caring for people with mental health conditions may be entitled to higher payments.
For professional caregivers, the compensation is somewhat higher: 70% of the minimum wage calculated as an hourly payment for one hour of care, but only for a maximum of 360 hours per month.
These payments are modest at best once the real costs of care are taken into account. A single pack of 30 adult incontinence pads, for example, costs around 600 UAH (approx. $13–14). A pack of 30 disposable underpads can cost another 500–800 UAH (approx. $11–18), while wet wipes, latex gloves, urine and faecal collection bags, and other basic supplies add roughly 500 UAH (approx. $11–12) a month. And this is only the cost of disposable care items.
The bigger expenses quickly add up. A walking cane for someone with a disability can cost between 150 and 1,000 UAH (approx. $3–23), an inflatable bath up to 2,500 UAH (approx. $55–60), and a medical bed as much as 30,000 UAH (approx. $660–680). And this list does not even include medication, food, paid medical assistance or other everyday costs.
It is clear that state compensation covers only a small fraction of what families actually need. The first consequence is often financial – someone has to absorb the majority of the costs, usually within the family itself. But money is only one part of the burden. The deeper challenge is how caregiving slowly takes over your entire life. Your daily routines, your work, your personal time and even your sense of self begin to revolve around the needs of the person who depends on you.
“Caregiving takes up so much of your time and energy – even physically. It doesn’t give you strength or a sense of fulfilment. At the beginning, you feel lost. You can fall into despair. You have to cut back on work and start living a completely different kind of life.
The exhaustion can reach a point where, in the rare moments of rest, caregivers feel almost absent from their own lives. Their eyes stare blankly into space; sometimes the only thing left to do is close them and imagine they are sleeping.
Every day becomes a series of repetitive tasks. Some days are worse, some are slightly easier. And through all of this, the most important thing is not to lose yourself or your own life. But that is incredibly difficult, because you become angry at the life you are living, you begin to see yourself as a victim – and, honestly, that is a dangerous path,” wrote Larysa Denysenko, a human rights lawyer and writer, on Facebook. She is the daughter of elderly parents.
Who cares for the carers?
Denysenko points to one small but important step in the right direction: the One Health initiative (a project that brings together different fields and professionals working at local, national and global levels to improve people’s health – ed.) has launched “Vseturbota” (“Care for Everyone”), a guide designed for people looking after older adults, people with limited mobility, people with disabilities and others who need support.
The project is built as a practical companion for caregivers, covering many of the everyday challenges they face. It does not only explain how to care for someone else – it also reminds caregivers that their own well-being matters. It offers advice on communicating with the person receiving care, organising daily routines, and developing basic medical skills. Of course, an online guide cannot replace the support and professional help families often need in real life, but it is a meaningful first step. For many caregivers, simply knowing that others are facing the same struggles can make a difference.
Another option is to move a loved one into a state or private residential care facility. Ukraine has around 300 such institutions. Of these, 96 are municipally owned, while the rest are state-run geriatric boarding homes and private facilities. Their number continues to change, partly because of the war and the destruction it has caused. Yet the number of people living in such institutions remains relatively small – around 22,000, according to unofficial estimates.
For many Ukrainians, the idea of placing a loved one in a care home remains emotionally difficult. There is a strong belief that caring for an elderly mother, father, mother-in-law or father-in-law is a family duty – something you are expected to do “until the very end”. There is also a deep-rooted perception of state-run care homes as places with poor living conditions and little comfort. The assumption is that people do not go there to live, but simply to spend their final years.
And yet the demand for places is high. Available spaces in these facilities are limited, creating waiting lists and, in turn, encouraging the growth of private care homes – although their cost can put them out of reach for many families.
A quick look through online advertisements reveals dozens of private facilities offering care for older people. Some have adapted their services to the realities of wartime Ukraine, highlighting that their buildings remain warm even during power cuts because they have their own generators. Others advertise a wide range of services and amenities – from medical supervision and daily assistance to more unusual features, such as… a petting zoo. Prices typically start from 10,000 UAH (approx. $220) per month and rise depending on the level and class of the facility.
And yet, attitudes towards such institutions remain complicated. In many countries, the moral question around residential care is approached differently. Visiting elderly parents in a care home only at weekends – or even less often – is not necessarily seen as a failure or a sign of neglect. Some older people who live alone even choose to move into such facilities themselves, sometimes selling their homes in the process. They make this decision while they are still physically and mentally capable of doing so, seeing it not as a defeat, but as a way of planning for their own future.
That, however, is how things work in other countries. In Ukraine, older people often remain largely out of sight when it comes to public policy. The government and healthcare system are largely focused on another demographic challenge: the country’s shrinking population and the stark reality that far fewer people are being born than are dying. According to figures from Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, 168,800 children were born in 2025, while 485,300 people died – a sign of the country’s deepening demographic crisis. Deaths outnumbered births by almost 2.9 times. Unsurprisingly, the full-scale war has only accelerated this trend. Since the invasion began, the birth rate has continued to fall, dropping by 25% in 2022 and by 26% in 2024.
As a result, much of the government’s attention is focused on one goal: encouraging people to have more children. The response has included greater financial support for families, efforts to improve healthcare – particularly prenatal care – and public campaigns promoting the idea of parenthood as a positive and desirable path. The private sector has moved in the same direction: reproductive medicine is expanding rapidly, and scientific advances and changing social realities are offering new ways to overcome difficulties with conception, from IVF to surrogacy.
The state’s focus is understandable – it is trying to secure the country’s future. But the “past” – the growing number of older people who need care and support – cannot simply be left behind. Yet while reproductive medicine is advancing quickly, geriatrics remains largely overlooked. There are no major breakthroughs, no comparable investment, and few new ideas for preventing or managing the challenges of ageing. In this area, Ukraine is falling far behind – and wartime has pushed the issue even further down the list of priorities.
At the same time, Ella Libanova, Director of the Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, notes that the war has already transformed the labour market. Employers can no longer afford the same level of age discrimination they once could. Previously, companies could be selective, setting strict age limits for candidates. Now, with a significant part of the working-age population having left the country, the shortage of workers is forcing employers to look towards groups they previously overlooked – including pensioners. For a country whose population has already fallen and is expected to continue shrinking, investing in healthy ageing and preventing premature decline is becoming not just a social issue, but a matter of national survival.
Keeping the elderly socially connected means creating communities where they can meet others and take part in activities that match their interests and abilities. And this is not about the familiar image of elderly people sitting on benches outside apartment buildings, passing the time in conversation. Older people need places where they can come together, build connections and remain part of social life – and this matters just as much for those with limited mobility.
Such opportunities would also take some pressure off younger family members, who often find themselves responsible not only for care but also for keeping their parents socially engaged. Local authorities could help address this gap, but, as it stands, they often have neither the resources nor – more importantly – the willingness to take on the task.
As Libanova put it in one of her interviews, “we still offer our elderly only three options: work, hospital, or cemetery.” But not everyone can continue working, not everyone needs hospital care, and not everyone is ready to simply disappear from public life. Yet for many older people, society still offers very few alternatives.
In the end, improving their quality of life often falls on the shoulders of their relatives – once again proving the old saying that “saving drowning people is the responsibility of the drowning people themselves.” One day, today’s caregivers will grow old themselves, carrying the same exhaustion and burden they are now trying to shoulder for others. And this cycle will continue until there is a clear demand from society for things to change.
