“I didn’t really want to leave home after graduating high school, and I don’t think my parents particularly wanted me to go. But I was eighteen and thought that was the grown-up thing to do. I didn’t move far. Just in with a friend and turned my part-time job from senior year into full-time work. But living with a roommate was so cold and lonely. We had different schedules and different friends and didn’t see each other that much. Knowing there was all this family activity still going on back home was really hard. I missed being part of it. I missed it terribly, the constant commotion, what was happening in everybody’s lives. And when I dropped by to visit, I missed it even more. So that’s when I decided to move back home. I just wasn’t ready to leave.”
With moving out comes the challenge of missing home and family.
For many older adolescents, leaving the comforts, familiarity, routines, companionship, and security of home for the more hardscrabble existence of operating on one’s own proves hard to do. In early high school, the time for moving out seems as enticing as the promise of pure freedom. But as graduation approaches, the next step of independent living feels increasingly complicated and daunting to take on. And once young people have moved away, four psychological challenges can make it hard to move past missing home:
Let’s examine each of these factors, and how they can be a roadblock to full independence.
Change is a disruptive process that cuts our ties to what we have grown accustomed to. For young people who have never been away from home before in a significant way, who have lived in one place all their lives, who are strongly attached to family, or who have little experience with major life change, leaving home to live elsewhere can be a major adjustment.
“I didn’t realize I’d be uprooting myself,” a freshman at a local university explained to me. “Everything I’ve spent my whole life getting used to has suddenly been torn away. I didn’t know it would feel like this! So lonely! Not knowing anyone! Having no place to fit in! So far away from family! It’s been hard to sleep, and I haven’t felt well. I know it’s crazy, but I feel abandoned by my family, when it’s me who has left them. It’s really hard concentrating on everything that needs to be done here when I spend so much time missing what’s back there.”
Contrast this young person with another student, a “military brat” for whom going off to the same college has proved no big adjustment. This second student is used to change: “I’ve been on the move and on my own all my life. Every two years we’d pack up and I was off to a new school. I was just expected to find my way, and I did, making a temporary home wherever I landed. After a while, I got to like the adventure of it. Life was never boring. As a matter of fact, the one thing I’m not sure about myself in college is having to stay put in one place for four long years!”
Getting used to any life change demands adjusting to the loss of the old and engaging with the new. The first can be painful and the second daunting. In combination, these adjustments can create anxieties, and these anxieties express themselves in common worries that parents can often ease.
By addressing these worries affirmatively, parents can provide assurances that encourage adolescents to try for more independence. But sometimes a parent can unwittingly jeopardize a young person’s departure by denying one of these five assurances. I am reminded of the father who immediately took over his daughter’s empty bedroom, boxed up and moved her belongings into the basement, and turned the vacated space into a study for himself. Now when his daughter came home, she didn’t have her old place to stay. Not only that, but all the objects that had meant to so much to her and had marked her history and territory were nowhere in sight. Expressing outrage, the daughter was very frightened and hurt that her presence had been symbolically eradicated in the home, and perhaps in the family. Just because she was ready to leave home didn’t mean that she was ready to give up her space at home, so she took the loss as a very painful rejection. Fortunately, her father immediately recognized the error of his ways and put her room back how it was—and how she needed to have it be for a while longer. The lesson is this: when young people physically leave home, they haven’t emotionally left home, so retaining that old place is an important way of letting them hold on.
But how long should they hold on for? The reality is that when young people leave to live away from home, it will be many years before they are able to establish a sense of place as powerful as home and relationships as significant as family. In fact, one sign of adulthood is when young people start referring to their independent dwelling, and not the place where their parents live, as “home.”
There are other ways parents can add to a young person’s difficulty with moving out and staying out. One of the most common is by sending double messages that undercut their adolescent’s resolve to move away from home:
When an adolescent is already anxious about leaving, it is best for parents to communicate confidence, not doubt: “We believe that you have what it takes to do this.” It is best to express enthusiasm, not instill guilt: “We are excited that you are taking this next step.” It is best for parents to give their blessing, not their disapproval: “We think that you have worked really hard for this next opportunity.”
By communicating confidence, you will help your child cope with the demands of change and move past his or her feelings of missing home.
Another psychological factor that can lead to missing home is when older adolescents face a drop in their standard of living when they are on their own. One young man explained his coming back home this way: “I couldn’t afford to live independently. Just the bare necessities were all I had, and it took all I made to pay for those. No car to drive. No cable TV. No cell phone. No computer services. No stocked refrigerator. No bills already paid. It didn’t take me long to figure out that I could live better back with my parents than on my own.” What he sorely missed were the material comforts of living at home.
For adolescents struggling with a drop in lifestyle, the best thing parents can do is explain the practical principles of starting out in life. They can describe how, when young people leave to live on their own, there is usually a drop in their standard of living. With a part-time or even a full-time job, entry-level employment does not pay much and usually comes with no benefits, such as health insurance, sick leave, or vacation. Young people often have to get used to living on less, both materially and financially, than they did at home.
This point is when important real-world education begins. Part of the challenge of independence is learning to get by on very little, to cut back, to do without, to buy on the cheap, to keep unnecessary expenses down, to stretch a dollar as far as it can go. This is a good time to practice budgeting and learn the self-discipline to keep to a budget. Parents can also share what it was like when they were young and starting out and learning to play the game of getting by on less money. They can also explain how making do with very little motivated them to work hard to be able to be more comfortable.
For some young people, the lifestyle drop that comes with trial independence can be hard to accept if they have been materially indulged and have not had to earn any part of their way during the earlier stages of adolescence. That is all the more reason for parents to give their children early exposure to earning their own way and working for the things they desire. But no matter where parents start, the best way to get past the issue of the drop in lifestyle is to show their child that this challenge—their child’s challenge—will help them gain not only the things they want in life but independence as well.
Homesickness feels like a real sickness. It is a combination of grief, anxiety, loneliness, and longing over the loss of family attachments that the separation from home creates. Although homesickness is most common in younger children who are experiencing short-term separation from their family, it can also occur in last-stage adolescents who have moved out for a job or college and find that they terribly miss the security and familiarity they’ve left behind. When this distance preoccupies a young person, it can significantly interfere with his or her capacity to reach out, get involved in, and adjust to the demands of new surroundings. If social withdrawal and isolation take over, depression can result. Although the pain of homesickness is mostly emotional, it can have bodily expressions, too—aches, nausea, sleeplessness, and general feelings of physical unwellness.
Last-stage adolescents can be complicit in causing their own homesickness when, to affirm their newly won independence, they push parents away, keep them at arm’s length, diminish communication to show they do not need it, and cut themselves off from the family connection they miss. Then they can even blame parents for not caring about them, when they are creating their own painful sense of distance by pulling away. A mother in this situation told her daughter, “You can live independently and still stay as much in touch with us as you like. We respect your separate life and we welcome your communication and contact at any time.”
A different kind of homesickness grows out of the obligation a young person feels to those left behind, knowing that he or she is missed by those who must now get along without the young person’s care. This can also motivate a return home: to shoulder family responsibilities, to tend to a loved one who needs it, to help out family. “My grandmother just wasn’t all right with me not there,” explained a young woman whose grandparent had been like a second mother.
And sometimes a young person’s homesickness is actually a mask for parents’ “childsickness.” They miss their child terribly and are having a hard time letting go. So they flood her with attention, encumber her with help, and obligate her with need, all to let her know that there is no place like home, no place where she will be more welcome or better loved. In this case, the issue is not simply the young person missing home; it is parents who miss having their child at home. When people talk about “helicopter parents,” this hovering attention is usually what they mean.
No matter the cause, homesickness is not a condition to feel guilty about or to criticize. It is simply a reflection of the young person’s having a tough time adjusting to the separation from home and the unease of living in a new place.
To work through homesickness, a young person—away at college for example—needs effort and transitional support from parents. If the young person grew up without having many major experiences with short-term separations from home, the separation that accompanies trial independence can be pretty tough. Being able to tolerate separation anxiety, to make an effort to engage with new surroundings, and to build new friendships all take courage and time. Many young people need the transitional support of parental communication, encouragement, and attention during the first year or so living away from home.
The cell phone and computer make these types of connections easy. Call it “electronic weaning” when young people rely on calling, texting, emailing, and messaging with parents while adjusting to more autonomy at the outset. Doing so gives them time to grow their comfort and confidence with their social independence. In these cases, your message needs to be the following:
If you faithfully send a message of support, encouragement, and independence, by the second year of living away from home, a familiarity with new surroundings, comfort with new routines, and relationships with new friends usually take hold. Attacks of home-sickness become less frequent and severe. The trick is to maintain good contact without interfering, to support autonomy without enabling dependency.
And parents can do one thing more. They can encourage their lonely son or daughter to make real connections with real people, and not rely on the Internet to broker new relationships. “When it comes to relationships on the Internet,” they can explain, “‘friends’ are not real friends, how people portray themselves is often not how they really are, and communication is usually devoid of honest emotion. To make satisfying friendships, you need to contact and spend time with people face to face.”
Sometimes what young people miss is a different kind of home— their high school years. For some, the high school years were the best years of their life, the memory of which makes whatever they encounter next a letdown. In fact, the experience of the high school years can have enormous bearing on how a young person’s adjustment to trial independence unfolds. Those students for whom high school was just OK or not great fun may be glad enough when it comes time to graduate. But those students for whom high school was a triumph in every way can have a hard adjustment when they leave.
These students sometimes crash in trial independence because of what I call the curse of the happy high school student. Suppose that in high school you were extremely popular and a superior student, were surrounded by a group of long-standing friends, had a romantically significant boyfriend or girlfriend, and found that many people wanted to get to know you. Then you go away to college, where you are socially no one in particular. With conscientious effort, you get average grades. You have a few acquaintances but no good friends. You have no romantic attachment, and other students show no particular interest in getting to know you. Gone are what seem like the best years of your life. In their place is a time when your old friends have scattered in different directions, and some have lost touch. Your level of achievement in this larger world of competition is relatively modest. What a letdown!
The realization sets in that, comparatively speaking, you will never be as popular or as relatively high achieving as you were in high school. “In high school I was Mr. Somebody!” complained a young man. “Here I’m Mr. Nobody. I was really smart in high school, but here I’m barely average. I looked really good compared with the other guys back home, but here I can’t compete with these gym jocks who spend more time lifting weights than they do studying. I wish I could go back to how it was!”
For many young people who leave home, whether moving out with a job or going to college, there is a sense of diminished competency and worth. In the larger world, they will never socially stand out as much or do as well, relatively, as they did in high school. In this more diverse world, they will never fit in so comfortably and securely as they did before. In this less hospitable world, they will have to work harder to create a new social group of friends. And unless they can recalibrate their self-expectations, disappointment and disillusionment may drive them home. When that happens, Mr. Nobody returns to his family at the end of the semester in a funk, with no desire to go back to where he counts for so little. Instead, he is determined to look up all the old high school friends who remain in town, to reconstitute the old group as much as possible, and to resurrect the good times they had as though the past can be recovered—when it actually cannot. For some young people, letting go of high school, and the high point of their life, is a very long good-bye.
After a while, though, even these young people who excelled in high school experience a painful conflict that creates significant discomfort when they hold on to the old high school gang. One young man said: “When I spend time with my old friends, I feel like I’m stalling out. Don’t get me wrong. I still love my friends. But I want to move on and move forward with my life, and to do that I have to break out of my circle. And I hate that. I hate having to leave old friends behind!”
His observation was correct. Growing up requires giving up, and one of the hardest parts of home life to give up is letting go of the easy company and constant availability of high school friends. The holding power of these groups slowly erodes away as individual members, one by one, begin a socially independent trajectory in life.
What can help a young person who faces this letdown in the year or so after high school is to celebrate the loss through meaningful mourning. Parents can help their older adolescents describe all the good things about high school that they now miss, treating those good times as grounds for confidence. Instead of just mourning the loss, they can value all the good they received. Your message is: “If you did well for yourself in high school, that just shows you have what it takes to do well for yourself again. But you must accept what is true for the majority of us. Because the world after graduation is so much larger than high school, most of us never make as big a social or performance mark for ourselves again as we thought we did then. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well for yourself and make yourself happy. It only means that the world of high school is over now, and your life in the larger world has begun.”
PARENTING PRESCRIPTION