Easing Post-College Transition for Your Child and Yourself

Finishing college is a huge accomplishment. Next comes the post-college transition, which is often more difficult than expected. It can involve your grad moving back home while he looks for work or considers what’s next. After the “high” of graduation, the next chapter can feel like a letdown. He may not be happy to be home and probably misses living independently. Dealing with entrances and exits from the family system can be difficult. Here are some tips that can help your child launch, and assist if he or she decides to re-enter the nest.

Continue reading my article for OC Family here. 

Preparing For The Empty Nest

What happens when you send your only or last child to college? Mom and Dad need to give some thought to their next chapter. You don't want your college student to worry that you won't be okay! You also don't want them to feel frustrated with the neediness of too frequent phone calls so that they are distracted from making a positive adjustment to college. Starting to think about this transition a year or two ahead of launching your only or youngest child is a good idea.

If you've been an involved and caring parent, you want to plan for the sense of loss that can occur when your son or daughter departs for college. I like to remind parents that launching your child successfully into college is the desired outcome of the parenting project. It's just that it's an ending. You may have feelings of sadness, loss, grief, relief, joy and worry. You will also have some free time and emotional energy that you can redistribute to other people and causes.

After the college launch is a good time to develop your sense of self. What are your other interests and passions you haven't had time to pursue? Would you like to take a class or learn something new? Perhaps you'd like to volunteer for a cause you care about. In Orange County, where my counseling practice is, we have a great non-profit organization called OneOC that can help you quickly scan most volunteer needs in our local community.

It can be helpful to picture your life as a grid of about 16 boxes. While you are in the heavy parenting years, your children can fill many of the boxes. As you prepare to launch the youngest, it's time to re-examine your grid. You need many different facets of your life to be fully developing and keep yourself interested and interesting. Here are some boxes to consider for your life grid:

• Creativity
• Career
• Spirituality
• Self-Care
• Physical Health
• Physical Activities
• Outdoor Time
• Personal Growth
• Love Relationship
• Friendships
• Community Service
• Family Relationships
• Home
• Finances
• Intellectual Growth
• Travel

In each area, you can identify a goal and a small step you can take to move forward. It's best to take on just a couple of grid blocks at a time. This can be a kind of road map for giving your life a well-rounded feel.

For couples, I like to encourage you to think of launching your youngest child as a time for a renaissance for your marriage. Here's a fun exercise you can do with your partner about creating positive experiences together:

Have each partner write a separate list about fun things you liked to do together when you were first together, what you currently enjoy doing together, and what you would enjoy doing together in the future. Next, compare lists. You can negotiate trying some of the future activities that each of you would like. Remember, before your youngest child departs is a great time to intentionally begin  growing closer and having more fun together as a couple.

Entrances (like births, adoptions, marriages and remarriages) and exits (deaths, divorce, separations and transitions to the next phase of life) are challenges for the family system. Being intentional about making the transition to becoming empty nesters another positive chapter in your life helps everyone.

Actively creating this transition will serve you better than ignoring it until you come back from dropping your son or daughter at college. The whole family needs to make some adjustments and grow, adults included. You may find that you grow closer to your child as the space increases between you. It helps to remember that a part of being a good parent at some transition points is letting go with love.

The Empty Nest

Parenting is like a long distance run. You are so focused on the race, for such a long time, that when the youngest child heads off to college, it's a big transition not only for the child, but also for the parent or parents who remain behind. What's next?

The transition to the empty nest is one I've helped many clients with over the years. It's also one I've experienced this last year as my youngest daughter headed off to the dorms. For me personally, after 23 years of parenting as a central focus, things changed. They still need you at times. Send money. Sometimes they call or text, and it's important to be there. You also want to give them the emotional freedom to separate from parents, make friends, organize their own life, and have parents step into the background. It's kind of like the National Guard—we’re here if you need us.

As a parent, we have to grieve the loss of an era ended. Just like when our children felt it was uncool to hold our hand, or detected the truth about the tooth fairy. We weren't perfect. We missed some things. We can miss the sweet little child who wrote us love notes, drew us pictures, wanted to go to the park, loved us to read stories, and couldn't wait to play board games. It's okay to miss that.

The empty nest transition is about beginning a different season of your life as well. It's time to reevaluate your own life. It's an opportunity to take a look at your life, and what you may still want to accomplish after launching the children. Do you want to take a different direction with how you spend your time? Would you like to reinvest or reinvigorate your career? Make a difference by volunteering? Improve or change your own relationships? It can be a time to enrich your marriage, or if you are single, maybe you'd like to date again. Perhaps you'd like to deepen your friendships, or add new ones in a way that was harder to do with children still at home?

Perhaps it's time to make a vision board for the goals you may want to create now. It may have been quite a long time since you've thought about how you'd like to further develop yourself. You may want to go back to school to study something you've never had a chance to, or make plans to travel more, want to downsize the house, learn to paint, take cooking classes, or start your own business. If not now, when?

You'll be a good role model if you reinvent yourself some in the empty nest years. You don't want the kids to worry about you not being okay while they are living their life as young adults. Rather than being sad, better to take responsibility for making it a positive transition for yourself. Plus, there are upsides to being an empty nester. I'm reminded of a cute New York Times interview a month or two ago with writer Anne Leary, who is releasing her new novel. She and her husband, actor Denis Leary, are new empty nesters as their two young adult sons recently moved out. She thought it was going to be hard, but they're doing okay and even having some fun with less structure and responsibility. Leary notes that she and her husband never realized how stressful it was to be good role models.

The nest can't stay full forever. Everything changes. Remind yourself that this is the result of successful parenting that your young adults have launched into college. For those of you with a college student or two headed home for spring break, like at our house, It's time to stock up the fridge and welcome the flock home for a while.

Bittersweet: Youngest Child Graduates

It's a big week for our family as our youngest daughter graduates from high school, ending an era of family life for us. Childhood transitions to adulthood, and the daily part of parenting will change for my husband and I. Over the summer months,our youngest and last daughter will prepare to head off to live in the dorms at college. It seems I got used to the rhythm of family life, and keeping up with the kids was a huge part of my life for the last 22 years. When the first two children went to college, we missed them, but the daily job of parenting, mealtimes, and curfew monitoring continued here on the home front.



When I talk with our daughter, her friends, and my patients that are graduating from high school or college over the next few weeks, it seems that most are feeling some mixed feelings. They are relieved to be finished with papers, finals, and deadlines. They are also worried about finding jobs, how they will do in the next chapter in their lives, and whatever comes next. They worry about leaving friends, and starting over making new ones. They can feel a mix of fear, excitement, pride, happiness, anxiety, stress, exhaustion, and sadness. Theirs is a loss wrapped up inside every graduation: a death of one chapter as a new one is birthed.



The family life cycle helps us understand that entrances and exits are challenges for families.We do well with homeostasis, having a set point for what is normal. When there is a family member joining, through a birth, a marriage, an adoption, or otherwise adding a new person, it takes 3 to 6 months for the adjustment, sometimes longer. Similarly, when a family member exits, whether to go to college, live on their own, separate, divorce, or pass away, it can be hard on a family, and takes some time to find a new rhythm.



"What's next?" is a question we get all our lives. We can eagerly be pursuing a goal, and then when we achieve it, feel a pang of sadness. It's bittersweet to achieve a goal, sweet because you got to completion, but sad because a gap opens where you have to define a new goal, and begin again.



So hug your graduate. Support them. Be there for them as the end one phase of their life, and anticipate trying to find their way in the next one. Don't ask "What's next?,"as they are probably grappling with that question themselves. Transitioning from one phase of life to another is stressful. It can even be hard on Mom and Dad.



Fortunately for us, even though the youngest is heading to college, the golden retrievers aren't moving out anytime soon.