The New Adult Children: How Senior Living Marketers Are Pivoting To Gen X

A couple decades ago, the baby boomers were the so-called adult children shopping for senior living options for their parents. Now, they are becoming prospective residents, and data shows more Gen-Xers are stepping into the adult child and family caregiver role as the years progress.

Although members of Generation X are still far from needing senior living services, they are stepping up to help their loved ones find senior living communities. For senior living sales and marketing teams, that generational change means that what worked to get someone to move in yesterday might not today.

According to Atria Senior Living Chief Marketing Officer Sanela Graziose, there are in 2026 more Gen X-ers involved in the senior living buying process than there were previously. But with the arrival of the boomers “everything is blurred” as they bring a wide range of wants and needs with them. As a result, some generational barriers regarding things like technology use are falling.

“As an industry, we should be able to wave our own flag of who we are and what our community is about” with regard to new generations of shoppers, Graziose said during a panel at the 2026 Senior Housing News Sales and Marketing Conference.

That’s why senior living operators including Watermark Retirement Communities, Atria Senior Living and Shell Point are adapting their messaging and strategies to fit the sensibilities of Gen X-ers and younger people. Specifically, they are placing a bigger emphasis on a sales and marketing process that is authentic, hands-on, more transparent and makes prospective residents and their families feel like they belong in a community.

Changing of the guard

The oldest baby boomers turn 80 in 2026, but they are not the only ones changing senior living sales and marketing. As the boomers age, some who previously shopped for their parents in the early 2000s are now passing the baton on to their adult children.

According to recent data from Pew Research, 10% of all adults in the U.S. report are a caregiver for a parent who is age 65 or older. A separate report from AARP showed the average U.S. family caregiver is 51 years old, putting them squarely in the latter half of the Gen X cohort.

Those trends in general life are bleeding over into the senior living sales and marketing process. For example, as many as one-quarter or one-third of prospects who come to tour Florida-based Shell Point had their adult children with them. In fact, sometimes, adult children are “secretly” involving themselves in the sales journey to ensure their parent has a good experience, according to Director of Sales Zach Gurick.

“Their parents didn’t even know they were there, and now their parents are coming back in a couple weeks with them,” he said on stage at the Sales and Marketing conference.

Senior living operators often refer to prospects as “adult daughters” due to the fact that, for years, it was mostly women helping their parents make a move into senior living. Although adult children of residents still are mostly women, the number of men helping make these decisions has crept up in recent years.

For instance, customer relationship management (CRM) data at Watermark Retirement Communities has shown the number of men shopping for their aging parents has increased by about three-quarters of a percentage point per year. Though that is not “revolutionary,” “it’s definitely evolutionary as we are starting to see more male bias,” said Jamison Gosselin, vice president of marketing and communications at Watermark Retirement Communities.

“We are starting to see more male bias, and as a result, that could potentially change how we handle our messaging, how we handle our media and how we do our targeting,” Gosselin said during the panel discussion on stage. “It’s going to be a big opportunity.”

‘Authenticity over perfection’

As more Gen X-ers and millennials take the senior living sales journey with their parents, senior living operators are tweaking their messaging and marketing to better reach them. At the root of many of these efforts is a need to personalize marketing and create more experiences that prospects can latch onto.

Shell Point stopped marketing its life plan community as a destination for “retirement” and instead focuses on “longevity and helping our residents live better for longer,” Gurick said.

“A big part of it is shifting away from retirement and toward vitality and thriving in this chapter of their life,” he said.

When showing prospects the community in-person or in marketing, Gurick said the community aims for “authenticity over perfection.” In other words, the community aims to show prospects what the community is like, not an overly manicured version of it. The operator also advertises its pricing online.

Atria also is leaning into personalization, believing that today’s adult children don’t want an experience that is “one-size-fits-all,” Graziose added. The operator also leans into authenticity by eschewing stock photography from its community websites.

The company organizes regular “social series” events that take into account resident passions and interests and help them feel engaged through acts of service. One of the events in the series that Atria held this year was a Coats for Kindness fashion show where residents walked the catwalk in fancy coats and then donated them.

That is an effort that helps the operator not only engage the people living within its walls, but people living in the greater community.

“It’s such a great opportunity for families to come experience us and get a feel for the vibe of that community,” Graziose said. “Are you a catwalk, fur-coat, awesome jewelry, makeup-on-point person? Is that your speed?” she said. “Or are you someone who dresses up your dog – like we did with the coats?”

She added: “Both great things, both different personalities.”

Prospective residents don’t necessarily need to tour a community to understand what happens within it. Atria posts event calendars and menus for its communities online so that web visitors can get a feel for it before ever stepping foot inside.

That information also provides latch-on points for AI-powered search engines and prospects doing their own research. To that end, Watermark also finds that real community reviews help community websites stand out with AI search engines. More than that, they can help win over sometimes “skeptical” Gen-Xers, Gosselin said.

“Typically, the website is going to be that first point of contact, so making sure you put reviews closer to the top rather than buried at the bottom, showcasing authentic photography; ideally through your social media posts that the communities are posting on a daily basis, is critically important,” he added.

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