Support Groups for Caregivers: 5 Real Ones
Aaliyah thought she was alone in the kitchen at 11 p.m. Then she opened Zoom and saw 23 other women in 23 other kitchens.
Tuesday, 10:48 p.m. Aaliyah is at her kitchen island in her bathrobe with the laptop open. She has been Googling "caregiver support groups near me" for twelve minutes. The first three results are funeral homes and assisted living facilities pretending to host groups. The fourth is a real one — a Zoom call that meets Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern. It started 48 minutes ago.
She does not click the link. She gets a glass of water. She walks back to the laptop. She tells herself she is too tired tonight, she is too late, she will go next week. She clicks the link anyway. The Zoom opens. There are 24 little squares on the screen. Twenty-three women and one man. A facilitator named Gloria is speaking. Aaliyah's camera is off.
Within four minutes, a woman named Rachel — Aaliyah guesses 50, in Ohio, in a similar bathrobe — is talking about her father refusing to bathe. She is laughing while she says it. Aaliyah starts crying. She is not sad. She is recognized. She did not know other people kept this exact list of indignities in their heads.
I thought I was the only one keeping a list of indignities at midnight.
She clicked a Zoom link with 23 strangers.
Tiina, a voice-first AI companion for older adults, lives in your dad's kitchen — not yours. Your support comes from people who are also in it. Five real support groups for caregivers worth your time: Family Caregiver Alliance, AARP Caregiver Community, Caregiver Action Network, Dementia Caregiver Solutions (Facebook), and r/AgingParents on Reddit. Pick one. Show up twice.
If you have not joined a caregiver support group yet, it is not because you don't need one. It is because you Googled it once at 11 p.m., got served three funeral homes pretending to host groups, and closed the laptop. The signal-to-noise on "support group near me" is bad. Anyone would give up after twelve minutes.
Your job is not to find the perfect group. Your job is to pick one — any one of the five below — and show up twice. The second meeting is the one where you find out whether it fits. Most people stop after the first.
You don't need a perfect group. You need to not be alone Tuesday at 8 p.m.
Why caregiver isolation is its own problem
The Family Caregiver Alliance reports that more than 60% of unpaid family caregivers show clinically significant signs of depression, and isolation is one of the top three contributing factors. The friend network that worked when your kids were small does not work for this. Your friends with healthy parents do not understand. Your friends whose parents have already died are grieving something different.
The structural problem is that caregiving doesn't have a workplace, a school pick-up line, or a soccer sideline where people who are doing the same thing run into each other. You do it in your mom's kitchen alone. The only people who get it are other people doing the same thing, and they are also alone in their own moms' kitchens.
Support groups solve this by collecting those alone-people into one room — usually a Zoom room these days — once a week. The room is the intervention. The room being good or bad matters less than the room existing on Tuesday at 8 p.m. when you would otherwise be eating cereal alone over the sink.
What works: five real groups worth showing up to
Family Caregiver Alliance runs Online Caregiver Support Groups — free, moderated, condition-specific (dementia, stroke, Parkinson's, general aging). Sign up at caregiver.org. Sessions are scheduled, structured, and led by trained facilitators. This is the most professional of the five. Best if you want clinically informed conversation and don't mind a more structured format.
AARP Caregiver Community is a free online community at aarp.org/caregiving/local — message boards, weekly virtual events, and topical sub-groups (sandwich generation, long-distance caregivers, post-stroke). Less structured than FCA, more asynchronous. Good if your schedule won't hold a fixed weekly time. Caregiver Action Network at caregiveraction.org runs peer-led groups and has a 24/7 helpline at 855-227-3640.
Dementia Caregiver Solutions is a Facebook group with over 100,000 members, peer-moderated, very active, raw, and specific. Search "Dementia Caregiver Solutions" on Facebook. Read for a week before posting. r/AgingParents on Reddit (reddit.com/r/AgingParents) is anonymous, text-based, brutally honest, and runs 24 hours a day — the best place for the 2 a.m. "I just snapped at my mom" post. Read the sidebar resources before posting.
What changes after the first three meetings
Aaliyah went back the next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that. By the third meeting she had her camera on and was sharing — about the bathing thing, about the moment in the Costco parking lot, about how her brother in Denver has not visited in fourteen months. Gloria the facilitator asked her if she had a therapist. Aaliyah said no. Two of the other women DM'd her therapist names in the chat afterward.
The group did not solve Aaliyah's caregiving problems. The group made the problems smaller because they were no longer secrets. The thing she would normally rehearse in her head at 11 p.m. became a thing she said out loud at 8 p.m., and the next 11 p.m. was a little quieter.
Her mom didn't lose anything in this trade. Mom still had her own routine, her own iPhone, her own kitchen. Mom has Tiina for the quiet hours when she wants to talk to someone. Aaliyah has Gloria's Zoom for the hours when she does. Both of them have their own thing now. That is the real shift.
Tiina talks with your parent between your visits — gentle, repeatable, always patient — so the quiet stretches of the day aren't so quiet.
What you can do this Tuesday
Three steps. First: pick one of the five groups. If you don't know which, start with Family Caregiver Alliance — the structure is the easiest entry point. Sign up tonight, not next week. The signup is a form, not an interview.
Second: put the first meeting on your calendar in pen. Camera off if you want. Microphone off. You can lurk for the first one. Just be in the room.
Third: go to the second meeting. The first meeting tells you nothing because the first meeting is just survival. The second meeting tells you whether this is your group. If it isn't, try a different one. The pool is wide enough that one of the five will fit.
What this sounds like with Tiina in the room
Wednesday morning, the day after the second Zoom. Mom is in her kitchen in Ohio. She opens Tiina on her iPhone. "Aaliyah was tired on the phone last night," Mom says. Tiina says, "Did she say why?" Mom says, "She was on some kind of meeting. With other daughters whose mothers are like me." Tiina says, "How do you feel about that?" Mom thinks. "Relieved. I worry she has nobody to talk to." Tiina says, "Did you tell her you were relieved?" Mom says, "No. I should." Tiina says, "Do you want to call her now, or after lunch?" Mom says, "After lunch. I'll think about what I want to say."
She thinks about it. At 1:30 p.m. she calls Aaliyah and tells her, in her own words, that she is glad Aaliyah has somewhere to talk. Aaliyah cries again, this time at her desk.
Mom has her own thing in the morning. Aaliyah has her own thing Tuesday night.
Aaliyah shows up to Gloria's Zoom on Tuesdays. Mom talks to Tiina in the morning over coffee. Neither of them is the other's only person anymore. The therapist appointment is on Thursday. The respite weekend is in three weeks. The stack is the answer, not any single piece.
Set Tiina up for Mom →Methodology & editorial policy
Reviewed and updated May 14, 2026 by the Tiina Editorial Team. Re-checked as new federal data, agency updates, or product changes warrant. Sources are linked below; numbers are not composite.
About composite scenarios. Scenes and sample conversations in this article are composite. Names and identifying details are changed; the moment is real.
About Tiina. Tiina is a voice-first AI companion for older adults — an app for iPhone and iPad that your parent opens to talk through a moment that doesn't feel right.
Sharing. Quote freely with a link back to this page. For full reprints, email hello@tiina.ai.
Sources. 3 references — primary sources for the numbers and claims above.View all
- Family Caregiver Alliance: Online Support Groups — We linked FCA's online support group hub as the first recommended group.. caregiver.org/support-groups
- Caregiver Action Network Helpline — We cited the Caregiver Action Network's peer-led groups and 24/7 helpline.. caregiveraction.org
- Alzheimer's Association Helpline — We referenced the Alzheimer's Association's 800-272-3900 helpline and local group listings.. alz.org/support-groups
Frequently Asked Questions
The most reliable warning signs the CDC and Family Caregiver Alliance flag: sleep disturbance, withdrawing from things you used to enjoy, persistent irritability or anger, appetite changes, frequent headaches or body aches, difficulty concentrating, and increased alcohol use. Three or more, most days, for two weeks means you've crossed from stress into burnout territory. A support group catches this earlier than going it alone. The Family Caregiver Alliance (caregiver.org), AARP Caregiver Community (aarp.org/caregiving), and Caregiver Action Network (caregiveraction.org) all run free virtual support groups on a weekly schedule. Showing up to a Tuesday Zoom for an hour a week is a low-cost insurance policy against the worse-case version of caregiver stress.
The 40-70 rule says if you are 40 or older, or your parents are 70 or older, it is time to start the hard conversations about aging — finances, housing, healthcare wishes, driving, end-of-life preferences. The rule was popularized by Home Instead Senior Care and is now cited by AARP, the National Council on Aging, and most major caregiving resources. The point is to talk before there is a crisis, when everyone can think clearly. Most families wait until after a fall or hospitalization, which is the worst possible time. A caregiver support group is a useful place to rehearse these conversations and learn how other families opened them.
Sometimes. The VA's Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers (PCAFC) pays spouses and other family members caring for eligible post-9/11 veterans, with payments often $1,500 to $3,000 a month. Medicaid in many states funds spouse caregivers through Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) waivers and Consumer Directed Care programs, though some states exclude spouses specifically — California, Connecticut, and a few others allow it. Long-term care insurance occasionally pays family caregivers if the policy includes that provision. Medicare does not pay family caregivers. Start with your state Medicaid office and Area Agency on Aging via the Eldercare Locator at eldercare.acl.gov.
Different caregiving organizations phrase them differently, but the three most consistently cited golden rules are: take care of yourself first (you can't pour from an empty cup), ask for and accept help (caregiving is a team sport, not a solo act), and respect your parent's autonomy (do with them, not for them). The Family Caregiver Alliance, AARP, and Caregiver Action Network all teach versions of these three. A support group is the place where rule two — asking for and accepting help — gets practiced. Most caregivers are good at rule three and terrible at rule one. The group exists to fix rule one.
