Your parent is sleeping through the afternoon, up at two in the morning, and you are awake with them. The clock has flipped, and nobody has said so out loud. Here is how to name it, track it and decide what to do next.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
The signs
Look for a pattern, not one bad night. Long daytime naps that run into the evening. Activity or calls after midnight. Meals eaten at odd hours or skipped during the day. Repeated waking, wandering, or trying to get up without help. Each of these can have many causes, and most need a doctor to look at the whole picture, not a guess from you or from a website.
Log it for one week
Write down the time your parent goes to bed, the time they get up, every nap longer than a short rest, when they eat, and any night calls or wandering. Add anything new that week: a visit, a change in a medicine, a guest, a new noise, a change in the room. Bring the log to the doctor. It gives the doctor something specific to work from, and it gives you a record that the change is real.
How to tell you have it
You have this problem if the night is now the only time you can think, if you are making decisions at three in the morning, if your parent's day has no fixed points, or if you cannot remember your last full night of sleep. Those are signs the household schedule has moved under you. They are not a verdict on how well you are doing.
What to do this week
Call your parent's doctor and describe the pattern with times, not adjectives. Ask whether the sleep change needs a visit, and ask whether any medicine on the list could be part of it. The medicine list, the doctor and the pharmacist keep those decisions, and you bring the information. A sudden change in sleep or confusion is a reason to call the doctor the same day, not at the next scheduled visit.
At home, work on the parts you can control: fixed times for meals and getting up, daylight in the morning, a short activity scheduled before the afternoon nap, low lights at night, and a clear, lit route to the bathroom. Ask the doctor before you change any naps or routines that touch health needs or medicine.
Give yourself the decision too
If the night is now the hard part, the question is not only how to fix your parent's sleep. It is also whether you need another person in the house at night, or a real break during the worst hours. That decision belongs to you and to the people who share the work. Our Permission and a Plan page is the next stop when you are ready to write it down.