Empty Nest Syndrome: when loneliness takes over the home

Parents saddened by the silence of the home.

The Empty Nest Syndrome is a disorder associated with the process of loss suffered by parents when their children leave the family home.

Empty Nest Syndrome

Have you ever wondered how do the moods originate? The answer to this question is complex, since they are born in the middle of a torrent of information that comes from both the inside and the outside of the person. We are not emotionally autonomous beings, with feelings that are born spontaneously in us and are poured outwards in our actions and our way of expressing affective states; in any case, nur feelings are born in the continuous feedback with what is happening around us.. 

With this in mind, it is not strange to think that our emotional states are due, at least in part, to the type of relationship we have with others and the degree to which we have occasion to relate to certain people.

Definition: the loneliness of the silent home

The Empty Nest Syndrome is a clear example of this. This concept is used to refer to the feeling of loneliness and sadness experienced by fathers, mothers and caregivers in general when the young people they once cared for are emancipated and no longer share a home with them.. Empty Nest Syndrome often occurs when children leave home to move to the city where their school is located, when they decide to move out on their own and take care of themselves, or when they get married. In all cases something similar happens: something changes in the daily life of the caregivers, because certain people are no longer as present as they used to be.

This sense of loss need not be based solely on the absence of contact with the children, but can also have a negative effect on the self-image if great value was placed on being responsible for caring for another person. The search for meaning in what one does may be disrupted if a large part of this existential effort has to do with raising and caring for others.

Differences between men and women

A simple variation such as moving from sharing a house with a child to no longer doing so can profoundly disrupt the repertoire of emotional states of parents and guardians because emotions are related to the objective changes that occur in the context. 

However, at present the context is determined, in part, by the gender assigned to each person. As a result of the gender bias women have had a traditional role linked to parenting and the domestic sphere, they are also more likely to experience Empty Nest Syndrome. are also the most likely to experience the Empty Nest SyndromeInequality objectively embodied (the distribution of household chores) also entails variations in the perception of this objectivity (the departure of children from the home).

But it is also possible that part of the reason why women tend to experience more of this feeling of loss lies in the fact that these episodes often coincide with menopause.

That does not mean that men cannot develop the typical symptoms of Empty Nest Syndrome, but statistically speaking it is less common.

What is happening with the Empty Nest Syndrome in our days?

It is very possible that in recent years the effects of the Empty Nest Syndrome are being affected by the changes in lifestyle habits and the economic crisis. On the one hand, an increasing number of young adults are unable to emancipate themselves due to lack of income. On the other hand, the fact that birth rates are falling in many countries may reflect the fact that there are more and more one-child families, which could mean that their emancipation would be a more abrupt change.

In addition, the demands of a tighter labor market lead many young people to work far away from their usual place of residence, making family reconciliation more difficult and leading to less frequent and more spaced-out meetings with parents.

It is also not as common for little time to pass between the time children are emancipated and the time they have a child, so in some cases people experiencing Empty Nest Syndrome don't even have the opportunity to take care of their grandchildren (which, on the other hand, if they exist, could be hundreds of miles away).

The partial loss of contact with a son or daughter may seem difficult to cope with in itself, but how this is experienced depends largely on material conditions such as those provided by the labor market and the economic situation of families.