Growing up, we may have had loving parents, but let’s be honest: it was Carrie Bradshaw who raised us.
Recently, we traded our sneakers for Manolos, and sat down with the real-life version: long-form journalist turned podcast host Vanessa Grigoriadis, creator of So Your Parents Are Old. Taylor Swift’s first Rolling Stone cover story? Vanessa inked it. With bylines featured in The New York Times and Vanity Fair, meeting her felt so SJP-adjacent our inner early-aughts undergrad could barely keep it together.
While Sex and the City favored cosmos over caregiving, Vanessa’s real life storyline shifted when she began caring for a mom with memory loss. Unlike her previously published work, Vanessa’s podcast dives deeply into the parts of life that don't always make headlines and glossy magazine covers.
A young Vanessa and her beloved dad
ICYMI (in case you missed it)
🦃 WPTV highlights a local nonprofit who delivers Thanksgiving meals to Palm Beach County’s youngest caregivers — kids and teens who help care for parents, siblings, or grandparents.
🦻 NCOA rounded up the best Black Friday hearing aid deals, making an often expensive essential for many, a little more accessible.
❤️ The American Heart Association breaks down what to expect when you become a caregiver and offers practical ways to cope.
🌼 First Quality is highlighting Family Caregivers Month with stories and resources that honor the people keeping loved ones safe, fed, and supported.
✨ NPR reports that millennial caregivers face unique challenges. Juggling careers, kids, and aging parents all at once, often without the financial stability older generations had.
So Your Parents Are Old
Vanessa Grigoriadis is the kind of bright that sneaks up on you. Not performative, not pretentious — just sharp in that New York cool and raised-on-books way. She grew up in the city with an immigrant professor father and an artist mother, played classical violin, danced, and eventually headed to Wesleyan, where questioning everything is basically a graduation requirement. She’s even got the famous Carrie Bradshaw curls.
Most of her career centered on culture — big personalities, big moments, big ideas. But life sometimes has a way of spinning off-script. Her father died suddenly. Her mom began to slip, a little at first, and then, following a fall, seemingly all at once. As an only child, a wife, and a mom with two kids, and a career, the transition was intense. She felt it and those closest to her did too.
Caring for her mom became what she calls the third shift, layered on top of work and motherhood, a role that feels less like a task and more like navigating a nesting doll of complications that keeps revealing sharper, harder layers. Medicare. Home health aides. Medical portals. Power of attorney. Systems that seem designed for anyone except the people actually using them.
She created So Your Parents Are Old from that exact terrain, born from the feeling of wandering a maze where everyone else appears to have a map while you’re still searching for the entrance. The title acknowledges, rather directly, what many are feeling.
With guests like Leeza Gibbons, actress Erika Christensen, former CNN anchor Amara Walker, and comedians including Lewis Black, the podcast pulls guidance and expertise from those who’ve been there and are mid-story too. Constructed with the tools her education and career gave her and created for the adult children trying to keep work, marriage, kids, finances, emotions, and two aging parents from imploding, So Your Parents Are Old is for those who need to hear:
Real talk. Guests who swear, cry, unravel, rebuild, and tell the truth about guilt, resentment, love, and the whiplash of it all.
Language for what you’re living. You’re the third-shifter, the life manager, the back-office brain for a whole other adult life.
Insight and intel. The stuff people only learn by doing: doctors worth seeing, aides worth keeping, what to push for, what to ignore, and the paperwork no one ever warned you about.
Evidence you’re not failing. Elder care levels even the most competent people. The system, not your stamina, is what’s cracked.
Looking to replay something other than your trip home last week? Check it out wherever you stream podcasts. Your parents may be old. Your playbook for supporting them doesn’t have to be.
What’s Good
Helpful care-focused finds we’ve identified and researched so you don’t have to.
If you haven’t yet checked out Care Out Loud, you should. Want guidance on how to start convos about care? They’ve got ‘em. Financial and legal cheatsheets? Yours for the taking. Plus, plenty of helpful resources, including yours truly. All free, all the time.
Powered by One Family Foundation, a nonprofit founded by actor, producer, writer, and producer Bradley Cooper, Care Out Loud exists to support the 63 million family caregivers in the United States. Bookmark it. Tell your friends. It’s definitely what’s good.
Parenting Parents
“Celebrating my daughter's first Thanksgiving and wondering if it's the last one my mom will remember.”
“The inappropriate jokes my dad tells will never get old.”
“The older they get, the more negative they are. It's tough to be around sometimes.”
“So much emotion around having their first Thanksgiving meal in assisted living.”
“Hearing the same story over and over and trying to not finish it for them.”
“My mom isn't supposed to drink anymore yet nobody else respects it.”
