One more Saturday morning rolls around. It's been three weeks since your daughter left for college. You sit across the breakfast table from your husband. Both of you seem absorbed in the morning paper, but behind its pages you stare off into space, feeling the loneliness. It's called "empty nest syndrome" and it describes both your feelings of sadness because of your daughter's absence and your confusion over how you and your spouse will spend the rest of your lives together.

When empty nest parents find themselves at a loss for how to cope after their children leave home they sometimes need some tips from a professional to help them make a healthy adjustment. Mothers and fathers, who have immersed themselves in the lives of their children while putting the marriage relationship on the back burner, are the most frequent suffers of empty nest syndrome.

The empty nest syndrome can provide the opportunity to refocus your marriage and build a new future together; one that will be about just the two of you. It can also be a time of renewing romance and of rediscovering the joy of the companionship you once had, before the children came along. Unfortunately, the couple who has focused all it energies on raising its family frequently loses the intimacy that was meant to flourish inside the marriage relationship.

If you are an empty nest parent what can you do to help yourself adjust after your children leave home?

1. Talk to your spouse about your feelings and share the sadness with each other.

2. Give yourself permission to grief the loss of the parent/child relationship as you have known it and your child's leaving home.

3. Spend time reminiscing about activities that you used to enjoy before the children came and then choose at least one of them to re-experience together.

4. Plan a date night at least a couple times a month to explore mutual interests while making new memories.

5. Stay in touch, regularly, with the children and focus on positive changes in the relationship between parent and child as each moves into adulthood.

6. Take up a new hobby or do something you've always dreamed of, but found impossible to do, during the child-rearing years.

7. Set a personal goal for self-improvement. This will enhance your attractiveness to your spouse and give you something fresh in your life to look forward to.

The empty nest syndrome signals the end of a significant part of your life as well as the beginning of a whole new chapter. How well you adjust to your children leaving home will depend upon whether you dwell upon what you have lost or focus on the future that you and your spouse can have together. Of equal importance is keeping the realization alive that redefining relationships with adult children can be both rewarding and healing.

Learn more about this author, Dr. Deborah Bauers.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

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