Late midlife adults are one of Canada’s largest yet most under-recognized and over-extended resources. They quietly tend to the health and well-being of millions of younger and older people, in person or from a distance.

From August 2024 to July 2025, Canada’s late midlife adults — those between the ages of 55 and 64 — collectively worked more than 100 million hours per month in a wide range of occupations like retail, law, engineering and health care.

In addition, Statistics Canada estimates they’re contributing 552 million hours per year formally volunteering, such as in crisis centres and schools. Late-to-midlife adults across Canada spent another 1.342 million hours doing unpaid informal volunteering.

Across Canada, baby boomers spent 1,219,000 hours of their 1,342,000 informal volunteer work hours directly helping family members like a parent or a sibling. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a good number were adding another 20 caregiving hours to their work week, whether in their own home or in a family member’s.

Both of us research population and individual aging. We have watched our own siblings feeling caught between supporting parents and supporting their children, deferring their own health needs in the process. This is no surprise, because about one in five midlife women are caring for a child and more than one-third are providing care for an adult.

A typical caregiver has been providing 35 hours of care per week for more than four years. Adding three more hours per week would put them at the tipping point........

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