Christy Byrne Yates, M.S., LEP 6/3/25

(This interview has been edited and condensed for length)

Zack:  Thanks for being here. Please share your caregiver story with us.

Christy: I appreciate being here. My story is unique and yet like so many others... So I'm going to go back a little bit. Maybe in 2011, I started paying attention to my parents. They lived about five minutes up the road…. I had two kids at home. They were in late elementary, middle school at that point. My husband and I were really close to my parents. They did a lot with us. But right around the early twenty tens, we just had to start intervening a little bit and helping them out with different things. And that's what I thought I was doing. I thought I was just helping them out. I didn't identify yet as a caregiver.

I want to say specifically, my parents had already formed a trust, had a financial planner that they worked with, and an advisor. So they had everything written down about how they wanted things to go. So I didn't have to have as many difficult conversations as many people have… But they started having problems, medical problems. My dad had had a stroke twenty years earlier. My mother had had breast cancer twenty years earlier. But they were doing great until they suddenly weren't doing great. And I was working full time as a school psychologist. So it was classic Sandwich Generation, even though I didn't have the term… I didn't know what that was called.

But I was raising kids, working full-time, and then suddenly taking care of mom and dad. So, things started to snowball, and it was very apparent that they needed much more help than we could provide them, stopping in a couple of days a week… I called a geriatric case manager program, and they came in and did an assessment, and it was pretty clear my parents needed a lot more help. They had purchased a plan that only provided for assisted living because that was their choice. That's what they wanted to have happen should that time come.

And at this point, my mother was diagnosed with, early stages of Alzheimer's, and my dad was diagnosed with vascular dementia. So, it was apparent that they needed a lot more help. We made the painful decision to go ahead and help them get into an assisted living program, and at that point, I became their power of attorney over their finances and became their healthcare advocate.

We're in California, my sister lives in Montana, and my brother lives in Michigan. They helped us out emotionally, pitching in when they could, but most of it fell to me… and it was a lot of work. They both [my parents] passed away seven weeks apart in 2015.

The same year, my oldest child, our son, graduated from high school and then moved across the country to college. So, it was just a summer of extreme highs and extreme lows, and it was a tough situation. I took a little bit of family medical leave when my father died first, and then my mother passed away, I took a little bit of time for myself, finally. When I went back to work, people were coming at me every day… “I'm in that same situation. What did you think about hospice? How did you handle this situation?” I thought, Oh my gosh, we're not talking about this. I started to take time to reflect on that, and it took about four years, and I wrote this book. That was the start of me transitioning into this new kind of passion of caring, caring for caregivers, really helping out other folks, and using my knowledge as a school psychologist about how this impacts people.

When I started to reflect, one of the things I remembered was so many times I would sit in a meeting with a parent and a teacher of a struggling child, and one of the first questions I'd ask would be, “Has anything changed at home?” And I'd hear stories about, well, we just moved my dad in with us, and he has stage four colon cancer, or my grandmother just died, and she was the one who took care of everyone. And I realized, this Sandwich Generation thing is real and it impacts the entire family. It's not just that person in the middle. Although that person in the middle, like me, we're squeezed and we're trying to handle two different generations, which is really different. So, that's a little bit about my story.

Zack: Can you share a little more about the impact this had on your job?

Christy: For work, it was tricky. And I will say I was fortunate that as a school psychologist, I had a pretty flexible schedule…. I made it flexible… unlike a teacher, I didn't have to be at a certain place at a certain time. I had an office that was in a central location, but it wasn't in a school, it was in an administration building. I was assigned to several different schools. I always met all of my obligations… I had to be at a school to observe a child, talk to a teacher, meet with parents, attend an IEP, and then do all the testing. School psychologists are mostly involved in qualifying children for special education services. So, we do a lot, all the assessment. And then we might work with the teacher to help them implement those strategies. So, I was always there doing all of that.

But, I also had to write 25-page reports for every assessment I did, at least 25 pages.  Sometimes they were shorter, sometimes they were longer, but you have to come up with this document that's a legal document. And I would write those at home, because that's what made my schedule work so that I could take off to go on a doctor's visit with my parent, or that kind of thing. I can tell you I never worked forty hours as a school psychologist. I think as a full-time school psychologist, my job was probably sixty hours a week, with the writing… But I found, okay, the kids are in bed now. It's 10:00 pm. I can start writing my report, and I'd be up till 01:00 am. It was grueling, but that was how I could free myself up during the day to do the things I needed to do. But that takes a toll, doesn't it?... It's very stressful juggling all of that… My biggest regret of not paying attention to that is that I don't have strong memories of everything that happened during this, like, five-year time period. I feel like I have some amnesia because I was just on a treadmill… I was not fully present. I know that now. I could compartmentalize to a certain degree, and then there were other times when I was just on autopilot, and that's not a great way to be a parent. And that's why I finally started to set stronger boundaries. That's what I try to talk to caregivers about is setting those boundaries, because you can lose that.

Selma: Christy, I heard you mention in a Mastermind session something that stuck with me. You said, “What happens at home comes to school.” I know that in your caregiving work, you now focus on whole family wellness. Can you share a little bit about some of the challenges that are different when you're working with children as opposed to the challenges of working with adults? 

Christy:  Thank you for asking that. Yes.  If we take some time to think about it, what's happening in our home life is going to impact our children. Whether they're actually in a formal school or maybe they're homeschooled, it's going to have an impact on them, and it has an impact on their attention, because our emotions have an impact on our attention.

We know from research that if a parent in the home has untreated mental health issues, like anxiety or depression, or something even more severe, substance abuse, that has an impact on children. There are no studies that I'm aware of that look specifically at the challenges of being a Sandwich Generation parent and doing caregiving and parenting. But, we know that people who are doing both often are anxious or stressed out, and can be struggling.

And then there's this grief process that enters into that. Even before we've lost someone, we may be going through a grief process. I think we can extrapolate and say these things that are happening for Sandwich Generation parents, do have an impact on children. We can't keep who we are away from our kids. And so they might see less of us because we're divided in our time. We've got to be here rather than there. We may be divided in our attention because we're working, helping them maybe with a homework thing, but we're thinking about that call we just had with our mom about something else difficult, or a doctor's visit that we had, or something. So, all of these things impact who we are as parents, and they impact how we show up for our children… And so we have to kind of give ourselves some grace and take some time to look at all of that.

Selma: Picking up your example earlier when you talked about asking why a child is having trouble in school and finding out that things have changed at home, for example, now grandma lives with them. Can you talk a little about how this may affect the child’s routine?

Christy: … I've come to know in this work… I didn't put it in my book because I wasn't as aware of it; there are a lot of children, over 5,000,000 children in the US, who are giving care. They are caregivers. They may leave home, leave school, and not have extracurricular activities because they've got to go home and take care of grandma or grandpa, or mom or dad, or someone, or a sibling. And so they are actively caregiving….  I would encourage parents always to talk to schools, like, here's what's going on and helping that child to still be able to have a social life, because it's costly and people lean into that.

And I don't think that's a bad thing… in the history of human beings, children helping out in the house has not been a strange thing. It's been part of life… grandma and grandpa help out with the kids when they're little, and then the reverse happens. The children grow up, and they're taking care of grandma and grandpa…. Youth caregivers. It's a bigger issue, and we're not talking enough about it. I think it's something that schools need to hear about more. That's something I've been trying to put out there.

Zack:  Christy,  you're definitely a unique guest because we haven't really delved into the Sandwich Generation implications, and you're describing them really well, especially on the children's side. Are there any specific things that could be done to help ease some of the issues that the Sandwich Generation goes through, perhaps different from what you would normally do for caregivers?

Christy:  I feel like it's important. And when I do workshops with folks or talk to people, I really just try to acknowledge what's really happening. And one of the first things I usually say to people is, you're not crazy. This is hard because you can feel crazy. But you're really doing two different things. Raising children is not the same as caring for an aging parent. The dynamics are very different. We've got children who we are helping to grow into independence… I think about the Twilight Zone of handing car keys to my son, who's a newly minted driver, and then at the same time having a conversation with my mom about, Mom, I'm not sure you need to be driving anymore. It is a Twilight Zone kind of thing. I think when we say that out loud and we acknowledge that this is a complex situation, and how it impacts us as the person in the middle, then we can start shaping some strategies. 

Selma:   In the work that you do with companies, what more do you think employers could be doing to help support caregivers?

Christy:  I think one of the things I often recommend is if they have any input into a company intranet, is to try and promote a section in that intranet on resources for caregivers… Like coaching sites, like coaches on the internet that they can find, or websites that they can find, or different kinds of helpful resources that they can identify.

Zack:  One of our favorite questions to ask is, if you could go back and look at the younger Christy before all this started happening with your parents, before your dad had the stroke, what advice would you give her, knowing what you know now?

Christy:  Oh my gosh. That's a great question. I think it would be for me to start realizing what I can do and what I can't do. Like, what's my role, and making as informed choices as I can… Like, when he had this stroke in his early sixties, if I could have maybe paid more attention to how does this look?... maybe encouraged him a little bit with his lifestyle… my dad was not an unhealthy guy, but he was a meat and potatoes guy… I might have said, Dad, I know you don't like salad, but we’ve got to talk about that.

Zack:  Good advice. Your book is called Building a Legacy of Love, Thriving in the Sandwich Generation. Why did you write it? What can readers expect from it? And then tell us where people can learn more about you.

Christy:  You know, it's not necessarily a self-help book. It's a little bit of memoir, and I do talk about my parents' different issues and concerns. And then there's just sort of my journey and how I handle different things going on. I took a lot of that from the journaling that I did. But then I tried to put something together to help people think about what they could do.

So I think in the very beginning, I say in the book, if you're someone who's in the Sandwich Generation, I hope you find something here that can help you. If you're not yet there but you see this on the horizon, I hope this gives you a heads up so you can have a smoother ride. And if you're older, I hope you hear some of these things and think about, well, maybe I do need to talk to my adult children more about my end-of-life wishes…  so it's kind of a genre-spanning book. You can find it on my website and that's christyyates.com. It's available at Amazon. It's available on Barnes and Noble. It's available as an online book anywhere you buy online books.

Zack:  Lastly, what do you do and how can people reach you to get some of your services?

Christy:  I do offer coaching. I offer one-on-one coaching. I am taking people right now for, hopefully, a future group coaching program… most of my work is with companies, and they'll contact me and ask for a Sandwich Generation speaker. I do a lot of virtual workshops. I do some in-person ones… I love doing this kind of thing, podcasts and writing. I do a lot of work with Al's authors. So that's in the dementia space that we do a lot of work. So those are the things I'm doing… There's a contact form on my website, and that's the best way to reach out to me.

Zack & Selma:  Thank you so much, Christy!