By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist
The Long Drive Home
Seven and a half hours in the car by yourself leaves a lot of time for reflection. It was the eighth and last return trip from dropping off a child to start a year at college. I kept thinking about the very first time. Lots of hugs, a few tears, and an ache in my gut the whole way home. I sat on his bed and thought, “This room is finally clean.” And I felt sad about it. Really. After thousands of “Clean up your room or else” threats, it had never been more obvious how meaningless that particular battle really was.
For a few weeks I kept walking into his room, when nobody was looking, of course, and re-experiencing that same sadness. It gradually faded, but it would flare back up briefly at the end of each vacation visit home.
Officially Empty Nesters
When our second son left, it took longer to adjust, because now there was total silence. We were officially empty nesters, and it genuinely felt empty.
What I Miss Most
I miss those early years. It’s easy to forget the exasperation, the worry, the anger. What stays vivid instead are the hours of floor time, the Sunday mornings when two young boys would jump into our bed, the family vacations, the strange, unique experience of a small voice calling you “daddy.” There are stretches where you genuinely wonder how you’ll survive the demands and the worry, and it’s usually more intense for mothers than fathers in most families, since they tend to carry more of the day-to-day load. But when this transition finally comes, the whole experience suddenly feels condensed, almost too short. The clutter is gone. So is the noise. So are the kids.
Filling the Space They Left
Remarkably, all of us adjust to a change this dramatic. But how we get there, and how easily, varies a lot from one family to the next. The quality of a marriage, and how each of us views life more broadly, strongly shapes that adjustment. I filled the hours I used to spend coaching, disciplining, playing, and talking with my sons with hobbies and community commitments I’d never had time for before. My wife and I suddenly had far more time to talk, and to do things spontaneously. Before long I was busier than when the kids were still home. Meanwhile, the boys have gone through their own period of remarkable change, one that’s genuinely reshaped my own perspective as a parent. We underestimate what it actually means for a young person to start being on their own. Why do we worry so much during those early years? Even the kids who struggle to find their footing at first gradually start moving in the right direction. There will still be real challenges ahead, no doubt, but for now it feels like a good stretch in their lives, and surprisingly, in mine too. That’s what I thought about on the long ride home.
We Worried About All the Wrong Things
I remember when homework, bedtime, eating properly at the table, and keeping toys out of the living room were the dominant parental concerns. Later those got replaced by curfews, how they dressed, grades, driving safely, sex, and substance use. Looking back, I can see the real substance in those issues more clearly now, but I can also see how much we, as parents, tend to overreact to the apparent importance of absolutely everything. We assume our kids will basically be fully formed by the time they leave home, and that what we do as parents is the primary force shaping how they turn out. That belief puts enormous pressure on us to cram in as much “shaping” as possible before they’re gone. It’s a costly assumption, because it adds a lot of unnecessary tension and gets in the way of actually enjoying our kids during the relatively short stretch when they’re living under our roof every single day.
They Keep Changing Long After They Leave
What becomes clearer once they’re adults is that our children keep changing in dramatic ways well past childhood. I’ve actually come to believe the decade from 20 to 30 is the period of greatest change in a person’s entire life. Psychologists have a name for this stretch now, “emerging adulthood”, and it tracks closely with what I’ve watched in my own sons. Moving out into the real world, making every daily decision themselves, wrestling with big questions like career and choosing a spouse, all of it tends to produce an adult personality that can look genuinely different from the child whose life we thought we were managing. And yet underneath all that change, I still see a certain core temperament persist, something more genetic and biological than shaped by experience, something parents have only limited influence over. All of it pushes me to be more honest, and more realistic, about what a parent’s actual role and influence really is.
What Actually Mattered
With more quiet in the house now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually helped my kids, and what might have helped more. As always, we end up doing most of our learning on the back of our oldest child. No matter what you’ve read or lived through yourself growing up, nothing fully prepares you for parenting. I know it took me too long, for example, to learn that my oldest was only ever going to work hard at things that genuinely interested him. But based on their own perspectives now (it’s genuinely fascinating when your adult children offer their own commentary on how they experienced you as a parent), two things stand out as the real positive influences. One is a sense of unconditional love, close to what the psychologist Carl Rogers called “unconditional positive regard,” a concept that can sound overused but that can genuinely be conveyed even through the hardest stretches. The other is a real willingness to encourage and support their own decisions, which requires a parent to stop trying so hard to shape their child’s path, and to genuinely believe it’s okay for kids to make their own mistakes.
A Very Short Window
The boys knew, even young, that they’d have a real say in their own lives, and that we’d be there for them regardless of whether their choices were ones we approved of. That built a closeness early on, one we kept nurturing throughout their years at home. It didn’t mean we were soft. There were real rules and real consequences. But I was especially clear, as a father, that making the relationship itself something I genuinely enjoyed was a priority, knowing the whole time that the window to share a daily life with them was always going to be short. In the normal course of things, we end up parenting our adult children far longer than we ever parent them through the growing up years. If you build real closeness while they’re young, it tends to get repaid with a closeness that carries on, deeply satisfying and important, long after the rooms go quiet and the sound of young kids has left the house for good.
