When adult children move out of the family home, resulting in what is familiarly called the “empty nest,” the psychological lore claims that parents, especially mothers, are devastated. However, like many terms in the psychology of adult development that stick around for decades (dare I say “midlife crisis”?), this one fails to receive support from research. True, there was one study back in the 2000s documenting “empty nest syndrome” (Mitchell & Lovegreen, 2009), but this fate only fell on a small and specific minority of parents.
The Roots of the Empty Nest
Why, then, did the term “empty nest” grow so popular or come to have so many negative associations? After all, birds don’t become destroyed when their fledglings fly away. They (presumably, as much as they’re able) consider it a sign of success.
Looking back historically at women’s roles before two-career families became a thing, the theory of the empty nest was based on the idea that by losing their parental obligations, mothers would experience a loss of meaning in life. This view was consistent with the general approach in sociology known as “role theory,” which, as the term implies, regards your social position as defining your well-being. Loss of position equates with loss of well-being.
Even back in the days when women’s roles were more traditionally defined, there wasn’t much evidence to support the idea that having children leave home was bad. In “family life cycle” theory, marital satisfaction starts to head downhill when children are born and remains in the gully until they leave the home, when it shoots back up again. There is a bit of a dilemma here, though, since it’s quite likely that many unhappily married people divorced when the children left home and were, by definition, no longer there to be tested on marital satisfaction, leaving the “survivors” who may have been highly satisfied all along.
A New Approach to Empty Nest Research
A 2025 article by Simon Fraser University’s Theresa Pauly and colleagues uses a dyadic approach to understand the empty nest transition. Rather than being viewed as something that happens to one parent, children moving out of the home is a “shared transition” that “may have particular impact on the couple as an interconnected system” (p. 110). Their research used a longitudinal design in which both members of the couple were studied over time across both the transition to parenthood and the empty nest transition.
As outcomes of each transition, the SFU team used health and well-being, theorizing that individuals might encounter changes over time within themselves and as a couple. They proposed that more shared activities and lack of children in the home would result in greater “concordance” (agreement) in both health and well-being. Concordance could, they suggest, denote both a “vulnerability” and “resilience factor, given that any transition-related changes are often shared between partners.
The samples in the Pauly et al. study included 3,501 German (studied for up to 35 years) and 1,842 Australian couples (studied over 19 years). The total subsample studied across the transition to parenthood consisted of over 2,000 participants, and across the empty nest transition there were over 3,500 couples.
At each year of the survey, they completed a life satisfaction rating (a simple 11 point scale), a physical symptom checklist, a self-rated health scale (5 point scale), and a rating of mental health (a six-item scale). As controls, the authors used age, sex, number of children, length of relationship, education, and total household income.
As they predicted, and consistent with past research by some of the authors, couples showed correlated year-to-year fluctuations around long-term changes in life satisfaction and health. This meant that if one partner had a good or bad year, (e.g. health was better or worse than what would have been expected), so did the partner.
Across the transition to parenthood, consistent with prior studies showing that this can be a tough time, there were drops in mental and physical health. However, couples also showed greater concordance in these outcome measures after than before the child was born.
For the empty nest transition, life satisfaction and mental health scores remained stable over time but ratings of health and reports of physical symptoms did show declines. This fits with prior studies of aging and life satisfaction. A lack of connection between declines in health and stability (or even increases) in psychological well-being suggests that older adults are resilient in the face of health-related challenges.
Family Dynamics Essential Reads
However, there were differences between the two samples, in part because the German sample experienced the transition anywhere from 1985 to 2002, whereas the Australian sample were followed across the years of 2002 to 2011. This provides a nice way to track the impact of historical time on the empty nest transition. The authors suggest that the later empty-nesters were better able to take advantage of technology to stay in touch with their children meaning that their fledglings continued to remain connected. Further, role adjustment could be easier in the later empty-nesters because “role expectations are less strict” and “life today tends to be less socially rooted” (p. 120).
As with the transition to parenthood phase, couple concordance in the outcome measures increased in the years after the change in their family structure. For the empty nesters, feeling closer to each other and sharing more activities could encourage a “contagion” process where they feed more strongly into each other’s mental and physical health.
Making the “Empty Nest” Transition Work for You
This complex and well-conducted study has a clear message that can help anyone who is dealing with a major family role transition. You’ve got your partner to rely on, and your partner has you. The transition does “provide a sensitive time frame for changing couple dynamics” (p. 121). Your life shifts as does your partner’s, and you cope with this together. But you could also translate the findings more generally into the idea that you do not go through any life transition on your own.
Other than your partner, think about the people you know who have children who are of a similar age as yours. Maybe you have a close circle of friends or relatives who share the frustrations, joys, and challenges of managing both life with and life without children.
To sum up, seeing the departure of children from your home as depleting may detract from your ability to see this change as one that reflects simply another version of the family you have built over time. Fulfillment can come not only at any age, but at any life transition.
