In the spring of 2000 a CICSW research class conducted a qualitative demonstration study about the subjective experience of parents when their children leave the "nest" to begin their lives as adults. The class of five was particularly interested in the topic because of our personal experience. In our literature review we did not come across a qualitative study such as ours, although we found a number of quantitative studies on the topic.

We began by formulating an open-ended research question for the two pilot interviews: "What is your experience of your child leaving home?" The questions for the next three interviews were: "What was/is the experience of your child leaving home like for you? How did you imagine it would be and what was the actual experience like?"

We conducted five interviews — three women and two men — each of whom had or was about to have one or more children leave home. The participants were currently married, middle class, professional or business people. Three were in their original marital relationship and two in a second marriage.

The leave-taking, emotionally significant for all, was described by the parents in larger-than-life terms — regardless of when it had occurred. We referred to their experience as a "sea change," while they compared it to the end of an era, as in the myth of Demeter. One father reported that he cried tears, which was almost unheard for him.

What we found surprising was that the parents’ strong reactions were completely unexpected--as if the feelings had come "out of the blue." They felt unprepared in spite of exposure to child development literature because that literature focuses on the child’s experience of separation, not the parents’. They felt little social support or understanding. They learned about this significant phenomenon by living through it.

For the parents, separation was a process, not a discrete event. Nevertheless, some of them talked about what we came to call a "model" scene in which the parent described a symbolic event that represented the sense of loss, such as driving a child to the airport or asking a child to leave home. However, no one considered these actual events, nor the preparations leading up to them, as anything more than one-step in a lengthy process that lasted far beyond the child’s departure.

A model scene described by one father focused on his response when his second son left home: "...when he left, gone from my sight, I was crying until I wrote him a letter and told him that his leaving home...had made me cry." The phrase "gone from my sight" caught our attention because we recognized it as the title of a booklet given to the families of dying persons by hospice workers. Here we discovered another kind of loss and grief that runs deep.

We believe our data has clinical implications and could be a springboard for further research. For example, we wondered whether the feeling of being unprepared for the intensity and duration of their feelings represents a failure of communication in our society and our child development literature or whether it is a natural element in the separation process. We also wondered about the impact of differences in parental gender, of divorce and the quality of the relationship between a specific parent and child. Even though this was a small pilot study, we hope that our findings and questions for further research might promote increased understanding for clinicians and for parents, helping to promote self-acceptance and a broader understanding of grief and loss.

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Nancy Silva, M.S.W., is a student at CICSW and in private practice in Modesto and Merced.

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