I came across this letter anonymously submitted to AgingCare.com, an online support group for caregivers:

“I am a middle child with four sisters. I am a widow. My children and grandchildren live in St. Louis, and my mother lives in Phoenix. I have taken care of my mother for the last eight months, away from my immediate family. I have done the very best I could taking care of my mother, but it has taken a toll on me physically and emotionally. I lost 25 pounds, couldn’t eat, was depressed, and had to have surgery so I could try to eat again. All of this made me realize I can’t do this anymore. The sisters are sending guilt- and shame-filled texts to try to change my decision, but I can’t. They are being so mean, saying I am being selfish. Not sure how I can deal with this. I would really like some advice.”

The letter struck close to home.

For 26 years, my parents cared for our elderly aunt in their home. They took turns with my father’s older brother and his wife. When you watch your parents, in their 70s, struggle to care for someone in her 90s, it opens your eyes to the massive gaps in elder care support.

And the caregiving crisis is about to get substantially worse.

About 34 million Americans are providing unpaid care to an older adult, often a family member. More than 75 percent of these caregivers are women.

“They are individually bearing most of the burden of one of America’s most pressing societal challenges: how to care for a population of frail elders that is ballooning in size,” Grace Gedye wrote recently in Washington Monthly. No one is prepared to handle the massive influx of demands the aging boomer population will add to an underfunded and incomplete government system, straining overburdened family caregivers and an inadequate healthcare workforce.

Between half to two-thirds of seniors will need some kind of long-term care, which is not covered by Medicare, and only partially covered by Medicaid, under specific conditions. The strain that the aging boomers are expected to put on Medicaid, and on their family members, is unprecedented.

And yet, there’s little public policy talk about it.

Lawmakers must begin seriously grappling with the issue, and family members need to have honest conversations about care and finances before a health crisis hits.

Mike Stith, 64, of Edwardsville, Missouri, knows all too well the toll caregiving can take personally. He was the full-time caregiver for both his parents for years before they died, having taken an early retirement when his mother got sick with cancer. He took over making major decisions for his parents, managing their health issues and helping with all the basic tasks of everyday life. And when his mother passed away and his father later moved in with Stith, it became a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week responsibility.

“You change your whole life,” he said. Stith now helps care for his elderly uncle in Kentucky, and spends one week every month there to keep up with his needs.

He says he ended up in the role by default -- no one else stepped up to do it. He hasn’t spoken to his brother since 2015 because he was so hurt by how he checked out of their parents’ situation.

“People think someone else will take care of it,” Stith said.

Caregiving for a relative is one of those family situations in which everyone has an opinion -- except the opinion that they should be the one providing the care.

If someone else has been doing the work, like in the case of the overburdened letter-writer, the bystanding family members should limit their comments to two simple phrases:

“Thank you,” and “How can I help?”

I heard my husband remind our daughter at least twice that evening to make the school lunches for the next day. Each time, we heard the same “okaaaay” from behind a closed bedroom door.

If you have raised or are currently living with teenagers, perhaps you’re not terribly surprised to learn that the lunches never got made. We discovered that in the morning, at breakfast, and were offered a timeless explanation: “I forgot.”

It was the second day in a row this task had been forgotten, despite the reminders. We were frustrated and informed our daughter that she would not be allowed to drive to school for the remainder of the week in an attempt to impress upon her memory this simple chore.

Guess who gets stuck driving busy teenagers everywhere when you take away their car? It feels like you’re really just punishing yourself, but maybe it’s also a way to teach accountability and consequences.

I was still stewing over that morning’s exchange when I was seated next to a former school counselor at an event that evening. She had worked in a suburban high school for more than a decade, and now serves as director of student services in another district. Her own son had recently graduated. I expected a sympathetic ear and perhaps some useful advice when I asked her how to get two high-schoolers to remember to do daily chores without having to hassle them. I’m not talking heavy lifting here -- just helping put away the dishes, keeping up with the laundry, taking out the trash, walking the dog, making lunches, picking up after themselves -- basic life functions.

Her response surprised me more than the unmade lunches had.

Forget it, she said. Let it go during the week.

High-schoolers are more overworked, stressed, sleep-deprived and overscheduled than we were growing up. They are taking more Advanced Placement classes and spending more hours in extracurricular activities, while entrenched in social media to stay connected to their friends. During her son’s high-school years, she explained, she stopped expecting much in the way of chores during the week, though he would help out on weekends.

She advised me to take a similar approach.

For those of us who grew up with tons of responsibility and far greater expectations of household contributions, this can be a difficult idea to embrace. It seemed radical to me, and I worried I might be doing them a disservice by lowering my expectations. “How will they learn responsibility?” I asked. How will they learn to manage time, how to function in the real world?

She suggested I take a hard look at their schedules. Both of them stay after school every day for at least a couple of hours for their activities, then they have several hours of homework each night. This is high-school life now, she said. When do they get downtime? Why add to all the stress? After all, adults who find themselves working similarly long hours often try to outsource as many chores as possible.

I started asking other parents of high-schoolers, and I heard similar remarks: When do they have time during the week to do chores?

The sad truth is that many teens are coming of age in a broken, time-starved system. Adolescent depression, mental distress and anxiety are increasing at alarming rates.

That night, I mentioned the counselor’s comments to my husband. He agreed that our no-car punishment was a little harsh. Then I talked to our daughter, who is in her challenging junior year of high school. I asked if she wanted me to take over making the sandwiches at night. She responded “no,” saying that it only takes a few minutes and that she would try harder to remember. But she seemed to appreciate the acknowledgment that she’s juggling a lot.

We still ask our kids to help out in the small ways family members should to keep a household running. But when they forget or fall asleep right after getting home, or the laundry piles up in their rooms, we’ve backed off the nagging and punitive responses. We’ve shifted some responsibilities to the weekend, when they are motivated to get tasks done before they are allowed to go out and socialize.

The next day, I made their lunches, and she drove to school.

After six years of researching how the higher education system works, Paul Tough has written a juicy, often-shocking book that calls out the College Board, the top universities in the country and politicians who have pushed access further out of reach from those who need it the most.

Tough, as they say, spills the tea on the whole system.

In “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us,” we meet people like Ned Johnson, president and “tutor-geek” at PrepMatters, the largest test-prep company in the D.C. area. Johnson charges $400 an hour to deliver results like what he did for Ariel, a young woman who had topped out with a score of 26 (out of 36) on the ACT after working with two other tutors.

Ariel’s parents poured money into sessions with Ned, who helped raise her score to a top-tier 32, which helped her get admission to her dream school -- Washington University in St. Louis. Wealthy families spending thousands on test prep is nothing new. The surprising revelation was the descriptions of the lengths this tutor went to to help his stressed-out clientele. In Ariel’s case, she was convinced that she needed to take a SoulCycle exercise class right before taking the test. Ned checked all over the metro area trying to find a class early enough, but failing to find one, he set up and replicated a SoulCycle class in her home.

That may seem bizarre, but Tough argues that parents and students set their sights on highly selective colleges because they know there’s a long-term payoff -- a belief, he argues, that is supported by long-term earnings data.

There are other behind-the-scenes moments that reveal how much money matters in this process.

“The easiest category of students for most enrollment managers to admit ... are below-average students from high-income families,” an admissions director tells Tough. He calls them CFO Specials, because they appeal to the college’s chief financial officer. Readers can see how this wrangling between admitting high-achieving students from poor families and lower-achieving students from rich families plays out in the admissions process.

It ain’t pretty.

So, where’s this meritocracy that Americans hold so near and dear?

The current system of highly selective colleges, aided by the College Board and its gate-keeping tests, works to protect its own interest and replicate privilege, Tough argues. He describes how the College Board, which administers tests like the SAT, distorted and delayed releasing its own data in public relations attempts to stay relevant and manage its own reputation. The College Board denies that they intended to mislead the public and posted a response to Tough’s reporting.

He wishes colleges would de-emphasize test scores in the admissions process, but he’s really advocating for much bigger reforms that would open the doors of opportunity for a larger number of students, like the GI Bill did for previous generations.

Some of the more disturbing details in his book further unmask the myth of meritocracy in a rigged system. Consider that American colleges collectively now give more institutional aid to each student with a family income over $100,000, on average, than they do to each student with a family income under $20,000. The colleges with the largest endowments that could actually afford to admit more low-income students, in fact, admit the fewest.

Tough also reports that the total black population at elite colleges has remained the same for decades -- 8 percent. About 15 percent of American high school graduates are black, but the percentage of black students at Princeton, Cornell, Brown, Yale and Harvard has never budged past 8 percent.

So, are these the years that matter the most when it comes to future success?

Tough makes a convincing argument that they are. He also shows us an uncomfortable picture of a system that is badly broken.

But most importantly and hopefully, he reminds us that it can be fixed.