How to handle an empty nest after your kids have moved out - The Little Things

Newstalk ZB host Kerre Woodham joins The Little Things to discuss becoming an empty nester. Photo / Jason Oxenham

The start of the year means a big change for a lot of families around New Zealand as many teenagers move out of home for the first time to go flatting or to university.

And while it may be a big adjustment for the kids, for their parents, it can be equally as difficult.

On this week’s episode of The Little Things, hosts Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey are opening up about their own experiences.

Ayrey’s second child has just gone to university and she admitted she starts off feeling sad but then gets angry about the situation.

“Like, really quite cross. I did some research into this because I was quite baffled, like ‘is this a normal reaction, what’s wrong with me?‘.

“But it’s do with a sadness and a lack of control because my kids are becoming more independent. It’s quite an admission, isn’t it? I am an angry mother when it comes to my kids leaving the nest.”

For Rudkin, whose eldest son went to university this year, she said that she and her partner are coping now but it was difficult at first.

“My partner was kind of mourning the loss of our first child leaving. He was like, ‘I’m going to be so sad, this is going to be so sad’. And he took our son down to university and settled him in at the beginning of February and came home and went, ‘oh, I’m fine’.

“He found the whole thing of dropping him off really emotional and walking around the university again and reminiscing about his own time. And he was really emotional by the time he got back home to Auckland. He’s kind of sad, a bit like me, and there are times we’re thinking about him all the time and love him dearly.

“But actually, we’re surprised at the moment that we’re kind of okay.”

NZ Herald podcast The Little Things is hosted by Francesca Rudkin and Louise Ayrey. Photo / Dean Purcell

To get advice on how to cope, they were joined by Newstalk ZB host Kerre Woodham. She was 24 when she had her only daughter, Kate, and Woodham told The Little Things that they were very close.

“She was my proxy going out person because my then husband really didn’t like going out... so Kate would come with me and she was my really cool plus one.”

When her daughter moved out at 18, one of the things that took Woodham by surprise was losing all her daughter’s friends.

“I loved having the girls and the guys coming around and getting ready to go out for their big nights and they were so gorgeous and so much fun.

“I loved the fact that they’d come around on the weekend for pool parties and I’d learn new music from them and they were just vibrant and young and gorgeous and just delightful to be around.

“And then she was gone. And they were gone. Because you don’t just lose your daughter, you lose that whole company of friends.”

Woodham ended up spending the first year Kate left doing extreme things – running her first marathon, and then writing a book about the experience and touring the country as a result.

But it was an unexpected purpose that she found from the experience.

“If somebody had said, ‘the way you fill time when Kate leaves home is to run marathons’, I wouldn’t have thought that was a viable option, shall we say.

“But it does mean that you can fill your life in a purposeful way and do things perhaps that you never imagined you might be able to.”

As time went on, Woodham said the other big change, as well as watching her daughter find love and have children and the adjustments that came with that, was letting her daughter live her own life, and not involving herself in the solutions.

“I remember Kate saying to me one day, she might have even been married by then, but she said to me, ‘Sometimes I just want to talk to you, I don’t want you to fix it’.”

Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for more advice from Kerre Woodham on getting through the early days of an empty nest.

The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series is hosted by broadcaster Francesca Rudkin and health researcher Louise Ayrey. New episodes are available every Saturday.