This article explores how the role of parents is so much more intensive, extensive, and different in the context of many developing country epidemics vis à vis epidemics in developed countries, and whether and to what extent the physical and mental health of older AIDS parents may decline from their close involvement with their ill children, relative to parents who do not suffer this unfortunate set of events. This article hypothesizes that parents who are most closely involved with caregiving experience the most severe impacts on their health. These negative impacts result from physical and emotional strains associated with caregiving and manifest themselves both in lower self-reported levels of overall health, and in a higher frequency of specific symptoms of ill health. Mothers are more closely connected with the intimate tasks of personal caregiving to PHAs than fathers, and as a result suffer more of the negative health consequences of caregiving than fathers do.