We all loathe that one parent who is always saying, “Oh, just wait until…” when it comes to parenting. The “just wait” person is actually the worst. The older empty nester who looks at you, while your kid is having a meltdown in Target, throwing their snack all over the ground and kicking you in the crotch, and says, “Cherish it now! They’ll be big before you know it!”
And while we want to wish the worst on that person who can’t mind their damn business, isn’t there some truth to this? I look back on photos and videos of my daughter all the time and cannot believe that she was ever that little and cute. It really does go by fast. The days are long, the years are short, as they say!
One empty nester dad on TikTok shared just how fast raising kids goes as he perused the grocery store, realizing that he just doesn’t need as much as he used to because his kids are grown and out of the house.”
“I’m in my local supermarket, and we dropped my son off at college a couple days ago. And I’m here and I have stuff like this,” Jeff Pearlman says in his video, panning over to some grocery store pumpkins.
“I used to pick out pumpkins with my kids. And I’m here and I see dads and moms with their kids in the cart and it used to be me with my kids in the cart. And it actually hit me, it actually hit me really hard that the house is empty and little things that you take for granted as a parent. Taking your kids to the supermarket.”
He fully realizes that, when you’re in the thick of it, taking kids with you to the supermarket can be stressful, but now that Pearlman is wandering the aisles solo, he wishes his kids were with him.
He continued, “Maybe it seems like a pain in the ass in the moment. You’d rather just leave them at home or whatever. But now I’m here by myself in the supermarket. And there’s not that much to buy actually because I don’t have two kids at home anymore and no kids at home anymore, and I’m looking at Halloween candy but they’re not going to give a crap. They’re not here.”
“And it just changes everything. and it is an adjustment. And I just want to say, for you, with your kids at home, please appreciate them and understand it goes very fast.”
Pearlman wrote in text overlay on the video that he’s suffering from the “Empty Nester Blues,” which are a real thing!
According to the Mayo Clinic, studies show that this transition of having an empty house can be overwhelming, leaving some parents with a sense of loss that can make them vulnerable to depression, anxiety, alcoholism, identity crisis, or even cause some strain in their marriage or current relationships.
This is known as Empty Nest Syndrome or the “Empty Nester Blues.”
“For the parents of a single child or for those bringing their youngest, the empty nest awaits them upon their return home…”, Marshall P. Duke, Ph.D Professor of Psychology at Emory University said.
“I tell the empty nesters that the adjustment will take several years. It will. But it is not all, or even mostly, bad. This is an exciting time, indeed.”
For empty nesters who are struggling with the transition, there are some helpful ways to keep your head up and learn to embrace this new chapter of life.
First, prepare for the transition. Don’t let it catch you off guard. Allow yourself to mentally prepare for the change. Organizing the transition can help alleviate some of that stress. Second, this new chapter is an opportunity to get busy! Try new things, find new interests, or get back into something that you’ve put on the back burner for 18 years or more. This can be a huge time exploration and acceptance.
