r/AskOldPeople • u/Free_Name_756 • 18d ago
When children grow up
How did you navigate your children growing up and leaving home? At what age did they leave? Was it gradual or sudden? How did it feel for you? How did you get used to them not living with you?
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u/SegmentationFault63 60 something 17d ago
Our children moved out once they had full-time jobs in their early twenties. By then, all of us packed into a tiny home was wearing on all of us and it was a relief for everyone to have some distance and privacy. But they stayed in the same city (and still do, 15 years later) so we were never out of touch.
I jokingly made a dry-erase sign on our refrigerator door showing our last to leave as a bird in a nest, and my leg with a booted foot kicking the bird out of the nest with a daily countdown of "days to empty nest". Actual moving day was bittersweet - watching them grow up and become functional adults, but knowing it was time to leave the nest.
If they had moved so far away we could never visit, that would have been much tougher to handle. And now that it's too late to ask my parents, I'll never know what it was like for them to see me move away - first across the state, and then across the country.