The many pathways of empty nesting

The common developmental phase of empty nester, as it has been dubbed, can stretch several decades as people live longer and have fewer children. Roughly 62 million U.S. adults are between the ages of 50 and 64, many of them parents who are nearing or have moved beyond the most intensive years of parenting.

The phrase “empty nest” implies a sense of loss, an emotional void that has been created when the last child leaves the family home. But research indicates that while some parents may struggle emotionally in the short term with the shift in parental role, other studies have described an alternate pathway with opportunities for growth, whether it’s committing more time to work and hobbies or deepening one’s bond with a partner or other loved ones.

“Now that your parental obligations are declining, it opens up time for you to rekindle your relationships and pursue other goals in life,” said Lisa Neff, PhD, a professor of human development and family sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. “This could be an opportunity for you to thrive both personally and relationally.”

A myriad of factors, from a parent’s sense of personal identity to cultural expectations to coparenting arrangements, can influence how this transition evolves. Increasingly, researchers posit that the feelings and adjustments surrounding this phase can be a mixed bag for parents.

Empty nesting is by no means a universal experience, especially in the United States given the prevalence of multigenerational households and families from more collective-oriented cultures. Moreover, an adult child’s departure may be delayed for years for economic or other reasons. In the United States, 16% of adults ages 25 to 34 still lived at home in 2023, up from 11% in 2005, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Even if adult children do move out, the empty nest stage can prove to be sporadic if they return for stretches because of job loss and other life shifts, such as quarantining during the pandemic. “Many families now move through partial, delayed, or reversible empty nests rather than a one-time transition,” said psychologist Jose Yong, PhD, a senior lecturer at Australia’s James Cook University, who coauthored a recent global review of empty nester literature (Communications Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 105, 2024opens in new window).

Applying a cultural lens to the empty nest transition is crucial, given that influences regarding family and gender roles, among other factors, can reframe how this stage is approached or perceived by the parents themselves, according to Yong. “For example, in some Asian contexts, children leaving home to pursue individual independence may be experienced negatively as a threat to family cohesion, whereas leaving for marriage, to further education, or for a career may be viewed positively, such as a source of pride or fulfilling responsibility,” he said.

When the transition does occur, psychologists can work with parents to not only adjust but flourish over time, ideally by taking steps long before it begins, said Cecilia Poon, PhD, a geropsychologist in Omaha, Nebraska, who chairs APA’s Committee on Aging. Psychologists can encourage parents to bolster their social network and think through this next phase in parenting and give them strategies to stay connected with their adult children. “Developing your own identity in addition to being a parent—the earlier you can do that the better,” Poon said. “It’s like retirement planning: It doesn’t happen 2 years before you retire; it’s truly an ongoing process.”

Not everyone believes that it’s truly a distinct stage of parental life. “The nest is never empty,” said Susan Krauss Whitbourne, PhD, a professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “You are always a parent—it is not a role that you step out of.”

This phase was first studied when most women didn’t work outside the home, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, with more research appearing in the 1970s and beyond, according to a 2014 literature review (Bouchard, G., Journal of Adult Development, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2014opens in new window). Most of the research that explored the so-called empty nest syndrome before the 1970s focused on middle-class White mothers and tended to be biased toward more extreme cases of sadness and depression amid the assumption that mothers suffered a major crisis when their children left home, according to Barbara Mitchell, PhD, a professor of gerontology and sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, who has studied empty nesters for several decades.

Psychologists and other researchers have since broadened their research lens beyond these more extreme cases and found that, while there can be a temporary and understandable sense of loss during this notable life transition, there are also positive aspects given the new freedom from day-to-day responsibilities of caring for children, Mitchell said. “A lot of the research surrounding the purported empty nest syndrome really started to shift at that point—that this was more a time of joyfulness,” she said.

Still, studies looking at how often parents develop depression and other symptoms remain scarce in Western countries, with the bulk of research involving parents living in Asia, according to Geneviève Bouchard, a psychology professor at the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, who authored the 2014 literature review. Broadly speaking, parents report more coping difficulties if they have been heavily invested in parenting and had to put aside their own friendships, leisure activities, and other aspects of their lives, she said.

Two primary theoretical frameworks have been advanced for how parents navigate this transition. One of them, the role strain relief model, theorizes that the easing of the daily time and emotional stressors of childcare and parenting logistics, along with the strain of juggling work and family, opens more time to chase other pursuits. The second framework, the role loss model, centers around a parent’s sense of loss of identity and accomplishment, which can lead to emotional distress.

Both Yong and Bouchard said that the two models can overlap and shouldn’t be viewed as binary tracks, with parents following one or the other. “In my view, the fact that there are both positive and negative aspects protects most empty nest parents from the severe negative effects of their children leaving home,” Bouchard said.

Other research gaps persist, with few studies looking specifically at fathers, single parents, stepparents, or same-sex parents, according to Mitchell. She was involved in one mixed-methods study, which interviewed 316 parents, both fathers and mothers. The mothers weren’t significantly more likely to report emotional difficulties with the transition than the fathers (Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 30, No. 12, 2009opens in new window).

Parents did express more distress if the child’s departure differed from their expectations, such as leaving home before they had finished high school, Mitchell said.

“They may be afraid that the child isn’t mature enough to look after themselves,” she said. “So, there’s a lot of unfinished business, you might say, for those family situations.”

For some couples, more space and time in their daily routine may deepen the relationship. One analysis, involving data from 3,765 mixed-sex couples in various phases of parenthood, found that both husbands and wives with an empty nest described a higher degree of marital closeness with their partner than those with at least one child still at home (The Family Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1, 2022opens in new window). The wives also rated their own health in better terms when they were in the empty nest stage, though the husbands didn’t, said study coauthor Lauren Papp, a professor of human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

It could be that more time was freed up on the wife’s schedule than the husband’s once their adult children lived elsewhere, time that they could invest in their own health, Papp said. “Whether it’s sleep, meditation, exercise, having more time to prepare meals,” she said, ticking off some possible factors. “Not needing to eat as many meals on the go.”

Other stressors also may fall away. Work-family conflicts between dual-income couples ebb lowest during the empty nest period (Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2014). While that may not be surprising, it does present employers an opportunity, given that their older workers may have more time and mental energy to focus on work, said study coauthor Tammy Allen, PhD, an industrial and organizational psychologist and a distinguished university professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

“This may be particularly true for women, who especially tend to carry that mental load [of parenting],” Allen said. “Women may feel like, Wow, here’s my chance to really focus on my career during this stage of life.”

But it’s still an unanswered question whether the net effect of empty nesting is positive or negative for couples’ relationships, Papp said. She noted that few longitudinal studies follow couples from before their children leave home through the full, often gradual departure—coming home for college breaks first, then moving out entirely. It might be, she pointed out, that empty nest couples appear happier because less compatible couples split before they have reached that stage.

Neff is the principal investigator on one such longitudinal study—Transitioning to an Empty Nest—funded by the National Science Foundation, which is enrolling 300 married or cohabiting couples. Researchers will follow the parents, starting roughly a year before the remaining children move out and for about 2 years afterward, incorporating detailed questionnaires and a series of shorter daily surveys.

Neff, a couples researcher, is eager to learn whether today’s more intensive style of parenting shapes those empty nest dynamics. “Today both mothers and fathers suggest that they derive more meaning and happiness from their parental role, and they’re more likely to identify it as the core component of their identity,” said Neff, citing related research (Ishizuka, P., Social Forces, Vol. 98, No. 1, 2019opens in new window).

For this reason, Neff questions if the empty nest transition “may be taking on more importance, at least that’s something we suspect,” she said. “If you have been allocating more of your time toward parenting and children, it leaves less time for you to have pursued other avenues of life,” she added, whether that’s friends, hobbies, or nurturing your relationship with your romantic partner.

Yet other couples “start living their best lives together,” Neff added. Through the study, she said, “We are trying to better understand what sets people on each course.”

Some parents are slower to go through this transition, if they ever do. “It was never an empty house,” said Katie Aguilar Mendoza, PsyD, of her parents’ multigenerational home. Aguilar Mendoza is a Massachusetts-based clinical psychologist specializing in working with older adults. “From as small as I can remember, there’s always been a full household.”

Aguilar Mendoza’s younger brother left home before she did to join the military. But even after Aguilar Mendoza moved out in her mid-20s when her lengthy commute to graduate school became too onerous, her aunt still lived in the family home with her own child.

And Aguilar Mendoza’s parents have always made it clear that their front door is open. “They said, ‘If anything ever happens, you have a home to come back to,’” she recounted. “There’s always a place for us and, for that matter, for anyone.”

Amanda Aguilar Mendoza, PsyD, who is married to Katie and works primarily with Hispanic patients in a community behavioral health center, noted that it’s less common for her patients to have an empty nest, so to speak, compared with non-Hispanic patients. But when the adult children do depart, Hispanic mothers can struggle in the short term, with reduced energy and a tendency to isolate themselves, she said.

“There’s this huge shift in identity and wondering, OK, well what is my role now? Because they were so used to being a caregiver and doing all these other things, especially if they had been stay-at-home moms.”

In other circumstances, such as when adults have an intellectual or developmental disability, they may remain in the family home for decades unless it becomes too physically challenging for their parents to care for them and they move to a group home or other living arrangement, Poon said. Sometimes parents feel a sense of relief, letting go of the physical and mental demands of caregiving, she said.

For others, it can be a difficult stage because they had lacked time to build other aspects of their identity, Poon said. Or they may wrestle with guilt, she said, “because of the sense that they should be able to do this until the very end. But [because of their own growing frailty] they really cannot.”

During therapy, empty nesters can think through the social network that they’ve already constructed in their daily lives, perhaps without even realizing it, Poon said. For instance, parents of adult children with disabilities may have been involved for years with local support groups, she said.

Psychologists also can help parents sort through how they view their own identity, beyond their parental role, said Douglas Lane, PhD, a geropsychologist who practices in Tacoma, Washington. What are their values and, related to those, what are some ways that they can further contribute to greater good in this world? As one example, parents who miss their teaching role with their own children can volunteer locally through school-based tutoring, scout groups, or museum programs.

As these discussions unfold, psychologists should guard against viewing a parent’s perspective through their own cultural framework, said Amanda Aguilar Mendoza. A psychologist from an individualistic culture, she said, may inadvertently shame a parent for struggling rather than celebrating their child’s launch away from home.

“Be understanding, be open to what their perspective might be,” she said. “Allow them to grieve that loss and then slowly explore other options that might be helpful for them.”

Lane is not immune to these multifaceted feelings, which he noted can be stirred up long before the nest empties. For Lane, the transition began when the first college brochures arrived for his daughter, who plans to attend college in 2027. “You’re losing the kind of relationship that you’ve had with this person for 18, 19 years.”

But while some parents can have emotional difficulties, even short-term depressive symptoms, this stage is not a syndrome but a natural and potentially empowering developmental phase of life, Lane stressed.

Work with parents to view this next phase not as empty, Lane advised, “but as a new page. What do you want to write here?”