DEBUNKING THE EMPTY NEST SYNDROM
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 92.
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Small Jar Podcast. Today I want to dive right in to talk about the empty nest, and more specifically what we typically hear people talk about as the empty nest syndrome.
Throughout the course of today's conversation, I want to invite you to reconsider what you think you know about the empty nest and consider a different perspective. First, it's really interesting because we talk about the empty nest in a way where everyone basically knows what we're talking about. You would think that this concept would be something that's been around for a really long time, but in fact, the phrase empty nest originated only about 50 years ago, in the 1970s.
Around the time, interestingly, when the majority of the listeners of this podcast currently were likely to have been born, plus or minus. The beauty of the phrase really is that it serves as a metaphor that's pretty easy to visualize. The nest is symbolic of our homes, where we've lovingly raised each of our kids for 17 or 18 years.
Then there comes a time when our children spread their wings and fly away from the nest. Once they leave, we're left with a metaphorically empty nest. But interestingly, now that I've experienced this with my older son, it's a nest where the bird returns during breaks and in the summer, somewhat sporadically, and maybe even less frequently as time goes on.
So it's not like the nest stays empty from a practical standpoint. And one can even argue that we're still connected to and even parenting our kids, even when they're not physically in the nest. So it's interesting that this phrase has gained so much traction, maybe because it's a simple way to explain this stage of life, this transition from full-time motherhood to something different, more fluid and dynamic, less predictable.
Historically speaking, before the 1970s, it wasn't quite as typical for kids to leave home in as much of an abrupt and defined way as it is now. For example, in 1960, only about 45 percent of high school graduates went on to college. Today, that statistic is more like 65 to 70 percent.
So more kids are going to college and therefore leaving home. And of course, the drastic increase in young women attending college, I'm sure, plays a big role here. In fact, more women attend college than men these days.
So more kids are leaving home, moving away, leaving the nest. So culturally, societally, we as moms are now much more likely to have kids who leave home and go to college or pursue a career far from home. But even as I say this, in the past, although kids might have stayed closer to home historically, there were times throughout history when young men would leave to fight in a war.
I can't even imagine the stress of having to say goodbye to a child as they deployed to fight. Even today, about 100,000 18 or 19-year-old men and women join the U.S. Armed Forces. So certainly, it's not new that young people leave home by any means.
But it's much more likely to happen these days than it did 60 years ago. And as times have changed, moms have had to grapple with a new kind of letting go. Since this phenomenon of what we think of as the empty nest is a relatively recent concept, you could even consider that as a society, we're still grappling with how to prepare ourselves for this major life transition.
I heard someone mention another factor recently. We're all living a lot longer these days. In the 1960s, the life expectancy for a woman was about 73 to 75 years old.
Today, our life expectancy is more like 80 to 83 years old. And of course, these averages vary depending on access to healthcare, lifestyle choices, and other factors. But ultimately, even on average, we're living at least another 10 years.
So let's say our kids are leaving home when we're around 50 years old, plus or minus. That means we have 35 or more years ahead of us. 35 years, that's a long time.
Particularly following a period of our lives where, for so many of us, we've been so caught up in the mayhem of raising our kids and supporting our families, that we haven't had a ton of time to sit around thinking about what we want to do with the rest of our lives. Here's something else to consider. In the 1960s, the majority of moms were traditional homemakers, primarily responsible for managing the household, the kids, the cooking, the cleaning.
Men were typically less involved in the child-rearing. Today, about 70% of women with kids under 18 work outside the home in some capacity, whether full or part-time. This is also a pretty drastic shift.
And while men are increasingly sharing more of the load of child-rearing than past generations, in families where parents are currently in their 50s or 60s, women are still managing the vast majority of the household responsibilities in addition to working. But even what it means to raise kids has changed considerably from even what it looked like with our parents. The vast majority of the women who listen to this podcast are Generation X babies.
We were born somewhere between 1965 and 1980, which puts us at around 44 to 59 years old as I record this podcast in 2024. Our parents were either likely at the tail end of the silent generation, born in or before 1945, or the early part of the baby boom, so born between 1946 and 1964. So in contrast, our kids are most likely either at the tail end of the millennial generation, so about 28 to 43 years old, or their Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2010.
Okay, that's a lot of dates. But why does any of this matter for a conversation today? So backing it up a bit, our grandparents were born during the greatest generation. They experienced the Great Depression and World War II.
This generation can be defined by raising their families to value hard work. Our parents, born at the tail end of the silent generation or in the early years of the baby boom, grew up in the years following World War II and during the Cold War. So members of the silent generation married young and popularized the concept that children should be seen and not heard.
And this generation also saw a big increase in the divorce rate. Then the baby boom generation of parenting is characterized as having a focus on wanting the best for their children. Wanting their kids to go to college was a big priority.
Later baby boomers lived through the 1960s and may have had wild pasts. The parenting style of these later baby boomers was much more focused on caring about how kids felt, possibly a big contrast from the silent generation. Now, as I read about these descriptions, I can't help but think that many of our own parents were caught somewhere in between.
Heavily influenced by their own parents' focus on hard work, feeling a little bit like kids should be seen and not heard, but also wanting the best for their children. Respect was also a big factor for those generations of parents. Many of my peers couldn't imagine talking back to their parents in the way our kids often talk back to us.
So let's talk about our generation. Gen X. We grew up with MTV and the AIDS epidemic. We played video games.
Remember Frogger? So what is our parenting style? One article I read online said Gen Xers are all about parenting, in quotes. We've studied parenting. Wanting to know the right way to go about raising our kids.
We care about work-life balance. We have, by and large, wanted to support our children's choices and flexibility to explore different lifestyles, much more so than earlier generations. We are involved in our kids' lives.
We volunteer at our kids' schools and sports clubs. We've been known to be the helicopter parents. Some of us may even be the snowplow parents.
It's fascinating to think about the phenomenon of our parenting as a generation's style, where we share common characteristics with other parents our age that differ drastically from how other generations raise their kids, raise us. Now when you look at millennials or Gen Y who grew up with the internet and social media, these parents, some of whom might have been raised by Gen X helicopter parents, have a much different approach to parenting. Generally speaking, millennial parents are much more laid back in their parenting styles than previous generations.
They're having fewer children and get married later or don't get married at all. In contrast to many of us Gen Xers, millennials don't try to fill their kids' schedules with a lot of activities. They don't actually want to overschedule their kids and give their children more unstructured playtime.
So for many of you listening, your own kids are Gen Z. They've never known a world without internet or phones or social media. They were tweens and teens during the COVID pandemic. Our kids have seen us struggle through a recession.
We've likely been open with our kids about needing to be careful about money. Millennials have by and large struggled more financially than earlier generations. So Gen Z has grown up seeing millennials not be able to get jobs out of college or have them move back in with their parents.
So all of these factors are likely to influence our own kids as they go on to decide to have their own kids. If you think about parenting styles as a pendulum that seems to swing between being highly involved and less involved, being free and open or being somewhat strict, it's not surprising that each generation grows up under certain influences and takes or continues those parenting styles that they feel worked for them and maybe drastically changes those that they feel didn't work as well. I've mentioned before that I heard a comedian talk about how our parents were like Home Depot parents.
They were around there somewhere, but you could never see them. We got to stay out until dark, quote unquote. There were no cell phones, so our parents couldn't track us or even find us if we weren't near a landline phone.
We had so much more freedom and autonomy than our own kids do. I sometimes wonder if we don't look back on our own childhoods and wish that we didn't have as much freedom. Maybe we have regrets about our choices or just know what kind of trouble teen kids can get into when unsupervised.
And so we want something different for our own kids. Now we're involved. We want to know what our kids are doing and where they are.
We also have access to so much more information than our own parents did, not just about our kids' whereabouts, but also about what other parents and kids are doing. Statistics about college admissions rates are much more prevalent and accessible than they were when we were all considering college as teens. As social beings who instinctually want to be part of the tribe, the increase in competitiveness of college of course creates this underlying sense of pressure for us as parents, who want ourselves and our kids to fit in.
We want to help our kids fit the mold, be the best they can be in a competitive landscape. I can't help but think about how my oldest once told me he was considering not going to college. At the time, we were having some big challenges, and so my reaction was not particularly open or understanding.
And he's said more than once since then that in the future, he's going to be really open to his kids not wanting to go to college. The pendulum swings. So I want to acknowledge that I'm making some pretty sweeping generalizations here.
There are of course many families that don't fall into these generalized descriptions, or many of us parents who don't fall into these generational descriptions of parenting styles. But what I want to point to is ultimately that times are changing and have been changing pretty rapidly over the past 50 or 60 years. The world is evolving.
Parenting styles are changing, and in many ways changing in reaction to past parenting styles. You can think about it another way. The way we view our role as parents changes from generation to generation.
And so it's interesting that this phrase, empty nest, only came about in the 1970s. And you could actually even wonder if this will be a phrase that stands the test of time. In other words, will future generations look at the empty nest in the same way as our generation does? I want to address a related concept, the phrase empty nest syndrome.
This phrase was also coined in the 1970s by a psychologist named C. Philip Bowman. The empty nest syndrome, in quotes, describes the feelings of grief, loneliness, and loss experienced by parents when their children leave home to go live independently, either at college or to start their own families. It's important to point out right away that even though this phrase, emptiness syndrome, has a clinical sounding name using syndrome, this is actually not at all something that can be clinically diagnosed.
In other words, it's not a psychological condition. First of all, there are no standardized diagnostic criteria for the emptiness syndrome, unlike mental health disorders like depression or anxiety. For example, diagnostic criteria for depression includes subjective criteria like the amount of time the person feels sad or the diminished interest in activities.
But there are also measurable criteria like weight loss or a decrease in appetite. Psychologists have not been able to create a similar set of standardized criteria for what is called the empty nest syndrome. And one of the biggest drivers of this is that what women, or actually women and men, experience when they transition to the empty nest is not a universal experience.
Not everyone feels sad or anxious when their children leave home. In fact, some parents celebrate. They feel relieved, free, or excited as they embark on their next chapter.
So as real and painful as the experience of the transition to the empty nest can be for some of us, there's a very wide range of experiences we as parents feel. I think it's really powerful to recognize that this transition to the empty nest is not a clinical problem. Because I think one disservice Dr. Bowman did for humanity when he coined the empty nest syndrome is that he gave us a reason to pathologize something that is, in fact, a normal part of life.
This label that Bowman gave to these feelings of sadness and grief that some of us experience when our kids leave home gives us the idea that our feelings are psychologically abnormal when nothing could be further from the case. I want to offer that the concept of the emptiness syndrome is a myth. It's a story we tell ourselves about what this transition means.
And that's not at all to undermine the painful feelings you may experience during this transition. These feelings themselves are very real. But there's nothing medically or psychologically wrong with you if you experience these painful feelings.
And for me, I think this is one of the reasons the mindset trap work I've been sharing with you over the past few months is so powerful. Because our minds want to keep us safe and comfortable. So when we experience negative emotion, of course we want to feel better.
It makes perfect sense that we want to feel more at peace and happier in our lives, of course. But I'm also talking about on a primitive and subconscious level, without any intentional thoughts, our brains will default to trying to make us feel better. And so I think it's a problem when we use a phrase like the emptiness syndrome and it becomes a pervasive and well-recognized state of being.
Because without really thinking about it, we can diagnose ourselves with this problem. And our brains love having a diagnosis because then it means we're one step closer to solving a problem. And when we're faced with a medical or psychological diagnosis, we can be inclined to seek medical or psychological treatment.
Anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, therapy. We're very fortunate to have access to all of these treatments. And there is a time when these are necessary.
Only you can know if these paths are right for you. But I want to offer you a different perspective, a different path. And let's start by considering why some women don't experience the feeling of sadness and loss that we've come to associate with that phrase, the emptiness syndrome.
Women have come to me feeling sad or lost, honestly dreading the time when their last child leaves. And these women will share with me why they think it's so hard for them in particular while they're going through this transition. Often, they'll point to circumstances.
If I only had a job while my kids were growing up, then I'd have something to keep me occupied. Others will tell me that they need to find a hobby, a new job, or just a different job. In some cases, they'll say they want to find a relationship or make new friends.
It's tempting to think that there's some set of circumstances that will simply take away the feelings of loss or grief. But the truth is, wherever you go, there you are. If you go get a new job or find a new group of friends or even move to a new city, none of those circumstances change your mind, the way you think about your life.
And if what's making you feel a sense of loss as your children move on to the next stage of their lives is something about what this change of circumstances means for you in terms of what you're losing or the lack of what you have left, no hobby or career is going to make you feel better until you get to the root of what's really going on with you. We experience our lives through our emotions. It's really very interesting to think about life this way.
Take a moment and consider what is it that you're feeling right now? What is that vibration in your body, the compilations of sensations that signal to you what you're feeling? Content or focused, bored or excited, in love or lonely? We experience our lives through these emotions, these vibrations. But what you may not fully realize is that those emotions are not created by circumstances outside of yourself. Your happiness or sadness is not caused by the time of day or the temperature outside.
Believe it or not, your emotions are not even caused by your kids or the number of friends you have or how you spend your time. Your emotions are a direct result of the way you think about all of it. If you don't believe me, consider this.
Some people love the morning. Some people hate the morning. It's all a matter of perspective.
Some people love winter. Others hate the cold. Some of us need many people around us.
Others prefer to have a small close group of friends. Some women are perfectly happy without having kids. And we as moms love our own kids, but don't necessarily have any feelings about other people's kids unless we really get to know them.
So the way we feel about anything in our lives is a direct result of the way we think about them. So getting back to that comparison between women who are excited by the empty nest compared to those of us who might struggle with the transition. It's a function of how we think about it.
Are you focused on losing the connection you have with your kids? Or focused on the freedom of having more flexibility and time to live life on your own terms? Are you focused on the emptiness of your life without a house busy with kids? Or are you thinking about how exciting both your kids' lives and your life is now that everyone is taking on new challenges and adventures? There is no right answer here. You're not doing it wrong if you're thinking more about the loss and emptiness than the freedom and the excitement. I don't think it's helpful to tell yourself you should just think happy thoughts or look on the bright side.
Sure, we can all change our perspective from half empty to half full if we really think about it. But I think it's much more helpful to get honest with yourself about what you're thinking. Get honest and take responsibility.
Because here's the really good news. The empty nest, your last child leaving for college, those circumstances are not what are creating your feelings right now. It is the way you're thinking about those circumstances.
Going back to the discussion about the different generations and how we've parented differently, I think it makes a lot of sense that this generation, our generation as moms, are having a hard time with the transition from motherhood to the empty nest. We, the Gen Xers, have been all about parenting. We've tried really hard to be good parents.
We've been involved in our kids' lives. Not all of us have been helicopter parents, but we've made it our life's work to raise these young people. Is it any wonder that many of us go through a bit of an identity crisis as we say goodbye to this chapter in our lives, say goodbye to the daily connection we've had with our kids while they've been at home? We face an identity crisis.
We could project the future as something bleak, catastrophizing what it will look like once our kids leave. We fall into the comparison trap, thinking about how other women we know seem to have it more together than we do. Or we've seen other moms really struggle or who lead boring, uninspiring lives once their kids leave for college, and we don't want to be like them.
These are just a few of the mindset traps that our brains can fall into. All in the interest of our minds trying to feel better and find comfort in a big transition. Change is scary.
The future is unknown. And what's actually certain is that the future is uncertain. So the question is, are you ready? Do you trust yourself to meet the future with confidence and peace? Do you have confidence in your ability to navigate not only the change ahead, but the choices that you now have the opportunity to make? My friend, the empty nest syndrome is a myth.
It's a story we've told ourselves to pathologize our feelings of grief and loss. But whatever you feel as you approach the empty nest, it's not a result of there being something wrong with you. It's simply a function of your perception of what this change means for you.
And so the solution, the opportunity for you is to develop a relationship with yourself, where you trust yourself to create the life and the relationships you want. That you believe you have the power to take control of your emotional life. All of this is possible for you.
And all you have to do is ask yourself the simple question, what am I making this mean? It's fascinating how powerful our minds are. Beautiful how hard they try to keep us safe and comfortable. And then in the process, also create so much unnecessary pain.
In my coaching program, Mom 2.0, I teach moms how to overcome these mindset traps and take control of their next chapter. Loss or freedom, dread or excitement. It's choice you get to make.
Until next time, friends. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0 at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
