(NYT) – The United States is reliant on unpaid family caregivers, and millions of adult children are caring for parents who didn’t really care for them.

In the early 2010s, a social-work researcher named Jooyoung Kong, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, looked at the proportion of American adults who were caring for older parents (currently around 10 percent) and those who said they were physically or sexually abused as children (more than 20 percent). She theorized that some adults were caring for parents who once harmed them, and she wanted to study them. Her colleagues assumed she would find very few.

Instead, in a 2015 study called “Caring for My Abuser,” which analyzed caregiver data, Kong and her co-author, Sara Moorman, found that of 1,001 adults providing care for aging parents, 18.6 percent reported having experienced verbal, physical or sexual abuse during childhood at the hands of a parent, and that 9.4 percent reported neglect. If the numbers played out at scale, this could be mean millions of Americans. (Read More)