The Sibling Problem: Why Caregiving Splits Families (And How to Stop It Before It Starts)
pc: From the movie “His Three Daughters”
There's a conversation happening in families all over the country right now. It might be in a group chat that's gone quiet. It might be in a phone call that ends a little too abruptly. It might be in the silence between siblings who used to talk every week but now only really connect around doctor's appointments and logistics.
It usually starts small. One sibling lives closer. One has more flexibility. One just... steps in. And before anyone has consciously decided anything, roles have formed, and with them, unspoken expectations, uneven loads, and a slow build of feelings that nobody quite knows how to name.
This isn't a story about bad siblings. It's a story about good people in an impossible situation, without a playbook, doing their best and drifting apart in the process.
Why this happens to the best of families
Here's what I've come to understand from talking to so many families navigating this: caregiving inequality rarely comes from indifference. It comes from proximity, circumstance, and assumptions that nobody ever said out loud.
The sibling closest to mom ends up at every appointment, not because the others don't care, but because it's just easier that way. The sibling with the most flexible job becomes the default emergency contact. The one who was always "the organized one" in the family ends up managing all the paperwork. And the one who happens to be a nurse or a doctor? They become the medical translator for everyone else, fielding calls at all hours, decoding discharge instructions, and carrying a different kind of weight that rarely gets acknowledged as caregiving at all. It feels logical in the moment. It feels temporary. It rarely is.
And here's the part that makes it so hard: because no one decided any of this, no one feels like they can question it either. The sibling carrying the most can't quite bring themselves to ask for help, because asking feels like complaining, and complaining feels like making a difficult situation worse. The sibling doing less often senses the imbalance but doesn't know how to step in without it feeling like criticism of how things have been handled so far.
So both sides stay quiet. And the distance grows.
What it costs — and it costs more than you think
The research on family caregiving is clear about one thing: this imbalance doesn't just create stress. It creates lasting rifts. Caregiving inequity is one of the most common sources of long-term sibling estrangement, the kind that outlives the parent and reshapes a family permanently.
But before it gets there, it shows up in smaller, quieter ways. A little less warmth in the texts. A little more edge in the voice when logistics come up. A parent who can see exactly what's happening and feels, on top of everything else, guilty about it.
None of this is inevitable. But it does take intention to prevent.
What gets in the way of having the conversation
Most siblings know, at some level, that they should be talking about this. So why don't they?
Because the conversation feels loaded before it even starts. Because someone is afraid of seeming like they're asking for credit, or assigning blame, or undermining decisions that have already been made. Because families often have decades of dynamics baked in, birth order, old roles, old wounds, that show up uninvited the moment the conversation turns to mom or dad.
And because nobody has a clear way to show the full picture. When one person is doing everything, it can feel invisible even to them — it's just the accumulation of a hundred small things that never quite add up to a single, easy-to-explain ask.
That last part is something I think about a lot. A lot of what makes caregiving feel lonely and unequal isn't that siblings are unwilling to share the load. It's that there's no shared view of what the load actually is.
A different way to start
If there's one thing I'd encourage every family to do — before there's a crisis, before resentment has a chance to take root — it's to create a shared picture of what's actually going on.
Not as an audit. Not as evidence in an argument. Just as a starting place for an honest conversation.
That means getting everyone looking at the same thing: the appointments coming up, the medications being managed, the tasks that fall through the cracks, the things that happen every week that maybe only one person knows about. When information is visible and shared, it stops being one person's burden and starts becoming a family responsibility.
It also means giving the sibling who's been carrying the most a way to hand things off gracefully, not as a declaration of failure, but as an invitation. Here's what I've been managing. Here's where I could use some backup. Here's how you can actually help.
That conversation, when it finally happens, tends to go better than most people expect. Because most siblings aren't waiting to be asked twice. They're just waiting to be asked in a way that makes it clear what "helping" actually means.
To every family reading this
If you're the sibling who's been doing the most: you're not wrong to feel what you're feeling. And you're not alone.
If you're the sibling who knows you could be doing more: that awareness matters. The fact that you're even thinking about this means you care more than you might be giving yourself credit for.
And if you're somewhere in between, which is most of us, just know that the families who navigate this best aren't the ones who have it all figured out. They're the ones who found a way to stay in the conversation, even when it's uncomfortable. Even when it's imperfect. Even when it takes a few tries to get right.
Your parent doesn't need you to be perfect caregivers. They need you to still be a family when this is all over.
At CuroNow, we built our app for exactly this moment: the one where a family realizes they need a shared view of care, not just a group chat. If you're navigating this with your siblings, we'd love to help. Download CuroNow and invite your family to the same page.
Know a sibling who needs to read this? Send it their way.
