My 13-year-old and 15-year-old are currently congregating at the dining room table. I’m cooking dinner while they’re locked in a heated Monopoly battle, laughing and bickering back and forth over “rent” while listening to the Hamilton soundtrack. I smile at them, thinking, I love these humans with my whole heart. And there, on a run-of-the-mill Monday night, I’m suddenly gutted. My mind’s eye flashes back to the 3-year-old and 5-year-old who used to crawl onto my lap and beg for one more bedtime story.
Those babies are just… not here anymore.
Of course, this isn’t an actual empty nest yet. I still have two more years before I have to steel my nerves to load up my eldest into a car bound for college. Nothing is wrong. If anything, this moment is a sign of how much is going right. So what’s this I’m feeling, this ache in my chest? Why does it feel a lot like mourning?
I’ve taken to calling it “nostalgia grief,” but I was curious if this is actually a real thing. Turns out, experts say what I’m feeling makes total sense.
Is this really grief?
The short answer is yeah, pretty much. “I would absolutely call this grief,” says Dr. Emma Basch, a psychologist who specializes in maternal health and parenting. “We sometimes frame it through the lens of nostalgia, but also talk about it as disenfranchised grief.”
The thing about disenfranchised grief that can make it feel especially tricky is that it doesn’t get acknowledged. No one drops by with a casserole or flowers or a card telling you to hang in there.
Therapist and certified thanatologist (aka grief specialist) Dr. Shirley Shani Ben Zvi adds another clinical term to the mix: ambiguous loss. “Ambiguous loss is when you grieve someone who is still physically here, but you miss who they used to be,” she explains.
To put it plainly, says clinical psychologist and parenting specialist (plus mom of three boys) Carrie Ann Dittner, “Nothing bad has happened; in fact, good things may be happening and your child can be doing exactly what they should be doing, yet something HAS ended.”
How is this different from regular nostalgia?
When you think about nostalgia, it’s wistful and cozy. It’s a warm-and-fuzzy longing for the past. The definition of anticipatory grief is a sense of loss before a loss has occurred. Nostalgia grief, according to Basch, “lives somewhere in the middle.”
As Kamini Wood, a board-certified, trauma-informed parent coach and mom of five, puts it, it’s grieving “a version of the relationship that no longer exists.” Unlike nostalgia, she says, it “can carry a genuine sense of loss alongside that warm remembering.” Unlike anticipatory grief, “the parent is not simply anticipating a future loss. They are repeatedly experiencing small transitions that have already happened while knowing more are coming.”
And, ugh, those transitions can be so sneaky. “The last time they ask you to carry them. The last bedtime story. The first time they do not need you to walk them into school,” Wood describes. “Most of the time, we do not even know something is the ‘last’ until after it has happened.”
Why aren’t we talking about this more?
Growing up is the whole point, right? So if it’s happening, you get this idea that you shouldn’t feel anything but happy. “So often we are told, ‘But this is a good thing,’ or ‘You should want this for them,’” Dittner says. “However, two things can be true. You can have immense pride for their growth and grief of letting go.”
The silence itself hits us from outside and inside, Ben Zvi says. Culturally, “you’re supposed to celebrate them growing up (only celebrate, I should say),” and parents are expected to be counting down the days to an empty nest. But you also know, deep down, that this is the best-case scenario, “so you don’t want to acknowledge it yourself.”
There’s a feeling of, if I say this out loud, I might be judged for it. So most of us just… don’t. Parents can feel “almost guilty admitting that their child’s independence hurts a little,” Wood points out.
Why does it hit some harder than others?
Basch explains that parents who have experienced other grief and loss, or trauma (particularly around having kids), may feel it more intensely. It can also have to do with “how much of the parent’s own identity centered around parenting,” says Dittner.
But, in Ben Zvi’s experience, it’s a bit of a leveler: “I honestly am yet to meet a parent who it doesn’t hit hard.”
When does it peak?
Just as every kid is unique, it would seem every kid breaks their parent’s heart on a different schedule.
Basch sees it spike around milestones: “back to school, birthdays, holidays, spaces where we mark the passage of time.” Ben Zvi clocks it around 16, when kids start driving (less time in the car together, less dependence on you) and college talk kicks up. Dittner also sees it a lot around the college transition, “as you truly become a passenger rather than the driver in their life.”
But sometimes, it isn’t a milestone at all. The trigger is just an everyday moment. “You look across the kitchen and suddenly realize their face has changed,” Wood says, “or you are looking up at them while speaking to them.”
Is this feeling useful in some way?
It might sound weird, but absolutely. “All feelings are doing a job,” Basch says. “This one is a signal and a way of feeling into one of the many unspoken parts of parenting, which is letting go of our kids as they grow up.”
For Wood, the ache is proof of attachment. “It says: This mattered to me. This season mattered to me. This person matters to me.”
And Ben Zvi calls it a good catalyst, pushing us to start building the relationship we want with our kids when they’re no longer kids at all. She suggests accepting the grief, then turning toward what comes next. How do you want to show up for them when they’re on their own? What are you “putting in their pockets” as they leave your home?
The point, then, isn’t to push this grief away or shove it down. “Feel it and don’t rush it along,” says Dittner. “The sadness has a place at the table.”
Wood underlines one of the most important reasons to make room for the feeling: “so that we do not ask our children to stay small in order to protect us from it.”
So, yeah, parenting is hard. Sometimes it hurts. Through every step, our kids still need us… even when it seems like they no longer do. Maybe there’s a little comfort in that? It’s all part of our kids becoming themselves, which is exactly what we want for them.
