COLLEGE DROP-OFF, THE EMPTY NEST, AND LETTING GO—HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT WHAT COMES NEXT | EP. 279
Welcome to the Almost Empty Nest Podcast, where we moms of teens and college kids reframe what letting go really means to feel more connected, confident, and at peace. I'm your host, Master Coach Jennifer Collins.
Have you ever thought, once my kid gets settled in college, I'll finally stop worrying so much? And then they get there, and somehow your brain just finds the next thing to worry about. Will they make friends? Are they happy? Did they choose the right school? And what happens after graduation? That's the thing about parenting teens and young adults.
College drop-off may feel like this huge moment of letting go, but it's really just one of many. Because the empty nest isn't only about them leaving home. It's about learning how to love your kids through uncertainty, without needing to know exactly how their story is going to turn out.
And today, I want to share three truths that can change the way you think about college, letting go, and this entire next chapter of motherhood. Let's dive in.
Hello, my friend.
It's that time of year again for college drop-off. And I recognize that you may be listening and not have a college kid. Maybe your kid's still in middle school or high school, or maybe your kid is already well beyond college.
But I want to invite you to stay with me, because what I'm beginning to understand, both through my own experience and through the work I do with my clients, is that the emotional experience we tend to associate with college drop-off never really ends. The circumstances might change, but the patterns repeat themselves. We actually start to feel them when our kids start middle school and high school.
We feel them during the college process and when we leave them on a new campus. We feel them when they transfer, when they graduate, when they move across country, begin a new job, or enter a serious new relationship. At every one of these transition points, we can find ourselves confronting the same questions.
Will they be okay? Will they make good choices? Will they find their people? Are they going to take care of themselves? Will they make the most of this opportunity? And maybe underneath all of these questions is one about us. Will I be okay if they aren't? I'm now the mom of a son entering his senior year of college, and I've got another son entering his sophomore year of college, but he's at a new school because he's transferring. I've recorded some version of this college drop-off episode every August for the past four years, and when I look back at all of those episodes, the way I've experienced those moments has certainly evolved.
That first college drop-off was gut-wrenching for me. I could not believe that I'd reach the stage of life where I would leave one of my sons at college and then drive home without him. Honestly, I began grieving that moment more than a year before it happened.
While he was still going through the college process, I was already imagining the goodbye and dreading the transition I couldn't wrap my head around. That second year, sending him back felt a little bit easier. I knew more about what to expect, but at the same time, my youngest was beginning his senior year of high school and entering his college process, and that process ultimately ended up being really disappointing for him.
Then came last year, and by that point, my oldest didn't need us to move him in or drop him off at all anymore. He'd handled it all himself. But I was dropping my baby off for his freshman year at a college he wasn't even sure he wanted to attend, and that goodbye was gut-wrenching in a different way.
I wasn't only grieving that he was leaving home, in fact, that my last one was leaving the nest, but I could also feel his disappointment as he walked onto that campus. This was supposed to be the beginning of an exciting new chapter for him, and instead of being excited, he was arriving already feeling let down. I wanted so badly for him to make the most of it.
I wanted him to find his people, embrace the experience, and somehow turn a path he hadn't chosen into one he could love. And if I'm honest, I also desperately wanted that for me too, because I did not want to spend the year worrying that he was unhappy or questioning whether this was where he belonged. Now, one year later, he's gone through the transfer process.
Through his hard work and determination, he actually earned the opportunity to go to a school that he is over the moon to go to. So in many ways, honestly, just seeing him so happy and so proud of himself, it's everything I want for him. But apparently, even getting exactly what I wanted for him doesn't stop my brain from finding the next thing to worry about.
Now, I wonder what it'll be like for him to transfer into an already established class. I mean, he's not going to have the same freshman orientation where you meet everybody and everyone's looking for new friends. I wonder if the transition is going to be harder than he expects.
And will this new school live up to everything he hopes it'll be? Meanwhile, my oldest is entering his senior year, and I'm not especially worried about moving him in or how he's going to adjust to this year, but I'm already thinking past college. What is he going to do after graduation? Will they find a job? And where is he going to end up? And through all of these transitions, what I'm reminded of is that there is always something else to worry about. First, we worry about whether they're going to get into college.
Then we worry about whether they're going to like it. We worry about whether they're going to make friends and take care of themselves, apply themselves, take advantage of everything the experience has to offer. We also worry that they'll want to come home or that they won't want to come home.
And just when they begin to settle into wherever they are, we start worrying about that next thing, the internships, the jobs, whatever comes next. Every resolved question is replaced by another one. And while we're worrying about everything that might happen in their lives, we're also trying to understand what their changing lives mean for ours.
What does it mean to be the mom of a college freshman? Or to have a senior who's about to launch into adulthood? What does it mean when your kid moves across the country? When I step back and I look at these past four years, I can see that the details keep changing, but the emotional experience can feel so similar. There is always something we don't know, always something our kids might struggle with, and there always comes the question of how we are going to handle whatever comes. So today, I want to share three universal truths I have seen play out in my own life throughout the years my boys have moved from teenagers into young adulthood, and also truths I've seen play out in the lives of the women I coach, many of whom have children far beyond the college years.
Now, these truths are not only about college drop-off. They're about how we mother our children through every uncertain transition still ahead. The first truth is there will never be a point where you know for certain that your child is going to be okay.
Now, I know that sounds a little unsettling because so much of what we do as moms is aimed at creating some sense of security around our children's lives. It's been our life's work to help guide and protect them, to help them make good choices, to help them take care of themselves, and help them be responsible, independent humans. But somewhere along the way, we can start believing that if we do enough, and if they make all the right choices, we'll eventually arrive at a place where we can finally relax.
We tell ourselves once they get into college, then I'll feel better. And then they get to college, and we think, well, once they settle in, then I'll feel better. But then they settle in, and then another worry takes its place.
Are they actually taking care of themselves, saving enough money, applying themselves? Are they preparing themselves for what comes next? Because we continue to think that once those things happen, then we'll know they're okay. But what I'm beginning to realize is that that point never actually arrives, or at least it doesn't last for long. Our brains actually just keep moving the finish line.
And I can see this so clearly in my own life right now. With my oldest, I'm not at all worried about him at college. But instead of just enjoying the fact that he's entering his senior year, my mind's working on what comes next.
And I can see how he's worried about all these things too. And I worry about how he's handling the stress of that. Our minds just want certainty about the future.
And with my youngest, it's similar with different circumstances. I want to know that transferring was the right decision for him. I want reassurance that he'll love this new school and find friends quickly, that he'll never look back with regret.
But I don't get to know any of that yet, and neither do my boys. And the reality is our minds don't like to have to face the discomfort of all this uncertainty. So we analyze every text and every phone call, every facial expression or change in tone, looking for evidence.
Are they happy? Are they doing okay? And if they are, we breathe a momentary sigh of relief. But if not, or if they seem quiet, or if they complain, something must be wrong. We can't help trying to answer questions that only time can answer.
But in the process, we can be consumed with looking for reassurance that everything is on track and okay. And look, this doesn't only happen when our kids go to college. The mom of a high school student might be looking at her kids' grades and their effort and their behavior, trying to use all of this information to predict their kids' future.
And we play out scenarios in our mind. If they don't get into that school that they really want to go to, then what'll happen? Or if they choose the wrong school, then what? Or what if they missed out on an opportunity because they don't work hard enough? What if they're disappointed or unhappy? We can truly believe that there is one right path, the path that will ensure our kids' happiness and success, and that it's somehow our job to figure out what that is, or simply to help our kids find it. But even the path we once thought was the right one can change.
The school they were thrilled to attend and get into may not be the place where they ultimately stay. Or they signed up for a major during their first year and thought it was perfect for them, but it ended up not being a good fit. Maybe the job or the internship they worked so hard to get might leave them questioning the career path they were so sure about before.
We get these moments of relief thinking everything's okay, and then that certainty goes away again. So this is the first universal truth I see playing out over and over again in this stage of motherhood. That there is no final destination where all of the questions have been answered, and you are permanently assured that your kid is going to be okay, because there is always going to be another unknown waiting somewhere ahead.
And the second universal truth is that somewhere inside of all of this uncertainty, your child is going to struggle. And I don't mean that something terrible is going to happen. I mean that no matter where your big kid goes, or how prepared they are, or how excited they feel about what comes next, there will be parts of that experience that are hard.
They may struggle to make friends. They may feel lonely. They could fall behind or feel unsure about their choices.
They could struggle with motivation, anxiety, time management, rejection, comparison, or the pressure to figure out what comes next. Even the child who loves college is going to struggle with something. And intellectually, most of us know that.
We know life isn't supposed to be easy all the time. We know our kids are going to experience disappointment and frustration and uncertainty just like all of us do. But knowing that struggle is part of life is very different from watching your own child go through it.
Because when it's your child, it's hard to observe their struggle without being emotionally affected by it. They call and they say they had a bad week, and suddenly your mind starts wondering whether they're really unhappy. They mention that they haven't found their people yet, and you begin imagining an entire semester of loneliness.
They say they're overwhelmed by a class, and your brain jumps ahead to them failing, or questioning whether or not they belong. One conversation can so quickly become evidence that something bigger is wrong. And I can see how easily this could happen for me this year with my youngest.
After the disappointment of last year, I truly want him to walk onto this new campus and feel like he has finally arrived where he was meant to be. But even if this school is a much better fit, he is still going to have difficult days. He could look around and think everyone else already has their friends.
Or he might miss something about his old school that really surprises him. He could feel behind, having to start over where he had already established so much in his first year at the old school. I can already see how tempting it would be for me to make those inevitable moments when he calls home with disappointment or frustration mean something about the choice he made to transfer, or how successful he's going to be at this new school.
This is part of what makes our kids' struggle so difficult for us as moms, because we don't simply witness what our child is experiencing. We begin to interpret it, and very often we also turn it into a story about ourselves. Did I prepare him enough, or did I help too much? Should I have seen this coming, or what could I have done better to have avoided this pain or disappointment? And then, what can I do now to fix it? We can have this automatic belief that if our child is struggling, we must have missed something or failed to protect them from something.
And that belief makes perfect sense when you think about the role we have played in their lives. For years, we were the ones who noticed when something was wrong, and then we fixed it. Then our kids get older, and we have to watch them face problems we can't always solve for them.
And we can't force them to go to class, or ask for help, or take better care of themselves. We also can't force other people to make friends with them, or make a disappointing experience feel less disappointing to them. And yet, the instinct to fix is still there for us.
We can't help but offer suggestions before our kid is even finished telling us what happened. And sometimes we find ourselves asking question after question, trying to get enough information to determine how serious the situation is. And then we're off, researching resources, making calls, or trying to create a plan.
And often we do all of this before our kid has even asked us to do anything. Meanwhile, they're calling in the moment they're upset. Maybe they wanted to vent, or in their mind they were just talking their situation through with us.
But because we can be so uncomfortable watching them struggle, we often respond as though their pain is an emergency. And you combine observing your kid's struggle, and the uncertainty of what all of this means about what lies ahead, and you have a perfect storm. Your mind goes to those worst-case scenarios that keep you up at night.
In fact, the struggle happening today can feel like proof of what will happen tomorrow. And if we're not careful, our child can feel like they can't have a hard experience without us interpreting it as something we need to fix as quickly as possible, so that we can feel better that they're on the right path again. I think this is one of the many hard parts of raising older kids.
Their lives are becoming more complicated at the exact time that our ability to control what happens is diminishing. And the stakes feel so much higher, and the consequences feel so much more significant. But our access and our ability to guide our kids goes away, or at least feels like it goes away.
Plus, when they're not living at home anymore, we don't see them every day. We may only hear the highlights or the lowest moments. And so we're often trying to understand an entire experience through a 10-minute phone call or a few text messages.
So when they struggle, we truly just fill in the missing pieces in our minds. And our minds very rarely fill in those pieces with the most reassuring possible story. The reality is your child is going to struggle.
They're going to be disappointed by something. They're going to feel left out, uncertain, frustrated, or afraid. They're also probably going to make choices you don't understand, and sometimes choices you wish they didn't make.
And no matter how old your big kid is, watching all of that happen may bring up every instinct you have to step in, to protect them, to guide them, and somehow help them find their way back to okay. Which brings us to the third truth. Your child's struggle is going to create an emotional experience for you.
And look, this is your child. It is impossible not to be emotionally invested in what they're going through. Their disappointment and their struggle hurts.
But also, on top of the simple empathy we feel for our kids because we love them, we have our own emotional experience of what we're going through as we watch all of that. We don't just observe what's happening in our kids' lives. We interpret it.
Your child says they're having a hard time making friends, and you think, this is exactly what I was afraid of. Or they say they don't know if they like the school, and your mind immediately goes to, what if this was the wrong decision? They tell you they're overwhelmed, and suddenly you're wondering whether they can handle college at all. The circumstance may be one difficult conversation, but your mind can turn it into an entire story about where this is all headed.
And that story creates an emotional experience for you. You may feel anxious, helpless, frustrated, guilty, or afraid. You might think you should have prepared them better, or feel angry because they're not taking your advice.
You could feel rejected because they're not calling or sharing as much as you hoped. And sometimes the emotional experience you have isn't only about what's happening with them, it's also about what their changing life means for yours. If they don't seem to need you, you may wonder where you fit now.
If they're moving farther away or becoming more independent, you may feel the loss of a role you once had. And this is what makes these transitions so complicated. Because yes, you are responding emotionally to what's happening in your child's life, but you're also responding to what their changing life brings up in you.
And that emotional experience can shift quickly depending on what's happening with your kid. They call and they sound happy, and you feel lighter. Maybe they tell you they met someone, joined something, or had a great day, and you feel like you can relax.
Then they call the next week sounding down and discouraged, and then your emotional state shifts right along with theirs. It is truly an emotional roller coaster. And on the surface, all of this feels like it's just the price of love.
And yes, of course their emotions affect you, and of course you care what happens with your big kid. But there is a difference between caring about what your child is going through and allowing every twist and turn of their life to determine your emotional state. And the difference can be hard to see when you're in the middle of it.
You can believe that you're simply being supportive when you ask question after question, or you could think you're just helping when you offer solutions they didn't ask for. And I'm not at all saying it's wrong to ask questions or offer solutions, but it's worth getting curious if what you're really looking for is reassurance. You want to hear that they're happy and on the right track so you can stop worrying.
And my friend, this doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. It truly means you love your child and you are emotionally invested in their life, and your brain is trying to protect you from the discomfort of not knowing how things are going to turn out. But when you add all of this together, it also means that your emotional experience can begin to depend on circumstances you have so much less control over than you used to.
You can't control their choices or their moods, their motivation or their friendships or their performance. You can't even control their willingness to talk to you. The older they get, the more of their life belongs entirely to them.
And this is already true for the mom whose kid is starting high school and pulling away. It's also true for the mom whose kid is going through the college process, and true for the mom driving away from a freshman dorm. It's also true for a mom of a senior who has no idea what comes next after graduation, and also for the mom who has a kid trying to figure out their lives after graduation.
The circumstances continue to change, but the emotional patterns can remain exactly the same. Your child faces uncertainty, they struggle, and then you have an emotional experience in response to it. And if we don't see this pattern for what it is, we can spend years believing that the only way for us to feel better is for something in our child's life to change.
So if uncertainty is unavoidable, and if your child is going to struggle, and if their struggle is going to create a very real emotional experience for you, then where is your power? Because it is not in knowing how the story ends. Your power also isn't in preventing every disappointment, or making sure your child is always going to make the decision you think is best. You can't make them call more often, or work harder, or choose better friends, or feel happier, or even figure out what comes next on your timeline.
But my friend, what I want to invite you to consider is that your power is in understanding what happens inside of you in the face of all of this uncertainty and struggle. It's learning how to care about what your child is going through without requiring their life to change before you can feel grounded again. And this does not mean becoming detached from your child, or convincing yourself that everything is fine when it's not.
But it does mean learning how to separate what belongs to your child from what belongs to you. Their choices and emotions belong to them. Their path, their timing, and ultimately the life they create belong to them.
But the meaning you make of all of it, the way you speak to yourself, the way you respond to your kid, and the kind of mother you choose to be in the face of all of this, that is your work. And this is exactly the work we do inside of Mom 2.0. Mom 2.0 empowers you to stop losing yourself in everything happening in your big kid's life. You'll learn how to recognize the thoughts that send you into worry and guilt and the need to fix.
And you'll begin to separate what belongs to your child from what belongs to you. And most importantly, you'll build trust in your ability to handle uncertainty, disappointment, and the moments when your kid is just not okay. Because you can't control how their story unfolds, but you can become the mom who knows how she wants to show up while it does.
You can find all the details about Mom 2.0 in the show notes. So this year, I might not be carrying boxes into my oldest son's apartment, but what I realize is that I will be standing by, watching and waiting to see where this next year takes him. And with my youngest, I will once again walk onto a new college campus carrying hope, fear, excitement, and all the stories my brain wants to tell me about what this year could become.
But I do not know where their lives are headed. Neither do they. But maybe that's the lesson.
Life does not give us certainty. And motherhood was never going to give us a life where our kids were always going to choose the path we understand, or where they would become exactly who we imagined they would be. In fact, life and motherhood, they give us something much harder.
We're asked to love our kids, standing on the sidelines while their stories unfold. Our kids are going to keep growing, and changing, and leaving, and returning, and choosing the lives we can't fully see from where we stand. And we're going to keep changing too.
What I've come to realize is that this chapter of motherhood isn't about learning how to let go of your child. It's actually letting go of the belief that you have to know how everything turns out before you can be okay. Because your child's life is still unfolding, and so is yours.
The most powerful thing you can offer them is not a mother who has all the answers, but a mother who trusts that both you and they can meet whatever comes. Until next time, my friend.
If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to check out my next free masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. You have more power than you think, my friend.
