Empty Nest: Finding Footing

The Finding Footing stage of the empty nest is when the question of who you are without the primary parenting role begins to yield some answers. Not complete answers, but early ones: interests that have been rediscovered or discovered for the first time, relationships that are being developed in their own right rather than managed around the schedule of children, a beginning sense of what the next chapter looks like.

For many parents, this stage involves reconnecting with aspects of themselves that were set aside, compressed, or deferred during the parenting years. Not necessarily who they were before children, because that person no longer fully exists either, but a self that is continuous with both the pre-parenting person and the parent, and that is now being assembled more deliberately. This work is slower than most people expect and more interesting than the early stages would suggest.

People at the Finding Footing stage of the empty nest often find that the peer support most useful to them has shifted. In the early stages, solidarity was what was needed: others who understood the specific quality of the disorientation. At this stage, what is most useful is the company of others who are in the same active, deliberate work of building something new. That company is most authentically available from people at the same point in the same process.