Patti Corder says she didn’t cope well when her twin daughters went off to college seven years ago.
“I cried every day until they came home at Thanksgiving,” she recalled. She and her husband Lloyd expect to do much better this time when their younger daughter Maura heads to the University of Kansas.
Mr. Corder and his father were Kansas graduates, and Maura will represent a third generation in his family to become a Jayhawk. Their daughter will be in the Kansas marching band, and Mr. and Mrs. Corder plan to fly to Lawrence, Kan., for several home football games this fall.
The Corders, of Ben Avon, will join millions of parents who will become “empty-nesters” this month as an only or youngest child heads off to college.
Those students will join what the U.S. Department of Education says is some 20.4 million students expected to attend America’s 5,300 colleges and universities this fall.
Natalie Caine says tears — shed by both fathers and mothers — are not unusual during such transition times. Ms. Caine leads workshops and counsels couples and individuals as they face a variety of life changes. She is a native of Wheeling, W.Va., who now bases her practice in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. For the past 15 years her areas of specialty have included “empty nest” support services.
Ms. Caine has had personal experience with this particular life change. Her only child, a daughter, selected a college in New York City, 3,000 miles from California.
In a recent phone conversation, Mrs. Caine emphasized that each family situation is unique. Do not measure yourself and your “empty nest” reaction to those of your neighbors, she advised. Each family and each parent within that family likely will deal with the transition — which she compared to a grieving process — differently.
She did offer some general warnings. Do not start to obsess about having missed too many volleyball games or school plays, she said. Such thinking can cascade into a torrent of regrets.
Avoid the temptation to set up unrealistic expectations. The new student’s promises to call home faithfully every Sunday night may be broken, Ms. Caine said. Even the assumption that the child will come home for the first holiday may fall through in the face of a Thanksgiving invitation from a roommate.
While the departure of a young adult for higher education may bring the potential for sadness and heartache, it also offers opportunity. “Take time for a pause,” Ms. Caine said. “You have an opportunity to reflect on your options and a chance to meet parts of yourself that you never had time for earlier.”
Parents watching their children leave home have to deal with a paradox.
“We encourage our kids to try out their wings and fly,” she said. But that new independence also means that they become less likely to call for advice when they face an academic or social life issue.
Even if a young adult is bad about keeping in touch, one of the most important things a parent can do is keep lines of communication open, she said.
Parents should assure their offspring that they can always call, text, write or Skype no matter what they may have done or what problems they are facing, she said.
The Corder family has strived to keep talking. When twins Megan and Mollie attended Kent State in Ohio they made regular use of Skype to get facetime with their parents and with their younger sister. Maura Corder said she made extensive use of Skype to call her big sister Megan for help with her homework. Those regular family phone calls and Skype sessions continued when the twins went on to do graduate work.
Lloyd Corder runs a Pittsburgh-based market research firm called CorCom Inc. and is an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. He sees a chance to renew a spousal relationship.
“I’ve heard that there are three things that couples can do when the last child leaves home: live on separate floors, get divorced or the husband can start dating his wife,” he said. Mr. Corder said he plans to pursue the third option.
A “Case’ for togetherness
Jennifer and Andrew Varner are expecting a smooth transition when their younger son Vance joins his older brother Zane at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. The family lives in North Huntingdon, and the boys graduated one year apart from Norwin High School.
Jennifer Varner has worked for 30 years for U.S. Steel, first as an engineer and more recently in business planning. Her husband, a retired Naval Reserve officer, is emergency management coordinator for UPMC.
Their two-career household meant that both boys, who earned the Eagle Scout rank, had to learn time management and self-reliance early.
“They would remind me when they had piano lessons,” Mrs. Varner recalled.
Last summer, Zack and Vance took part in school study trip to Spain. As their parents took them to the airport, their mother said she found that she was not nervous about their adventure. “I realized I was not anxious,” she said. “I was jealous.”
Mrs. Varner said she realized that she and her husband will have the gift of more time when the boys are in school, and they have been making plans accordingly. This fall they are going on a parents-only expedition to Belgium. Next year Mrs. Varner plans a trip to Greece with a girlfriend while her husband goes hunting out West.
Still there are trade-offs whenever a child leaves home. Vance has taught himself to cook. “He makes fabulous food, and we will miss our short-order cook,” Mrs. Varner said.
She joked that a non-human member of the household likely is to be the saddest when Vance and Zack head to Cleveland. Stargell is the family’s English setter.
“Our dog may suffer the most. He will miss both his buddies.”
Len Barcousky: lbarcousky@gmail.com.
First Published: August 16, 2018, 2:38 p.m.