Caring for ageing parents is becoming a financial nightmare in the US. Here’s what we can do | Courtney E Martin

Key points

• What does it cost to age with dignity?
• It’s an urgent question as the youngest baby boomers approach 65 and their adult children prepare to take on their care.
• I’m one of those adult children – visiting my dad, with advanced dementia, every week in the memory care facility where he has lived for a year, costing $8,500 a month out of pocket.
• I also live with my mom, who just got a knee replacement and deals with a chronic autoimmune illness.
• Like many women of her generation, she had little paid work after my brother and I were born in the early 80s.