Managing the Emotional Journey of Your Child Leaving for University: How to Cope and Keep the Tears in Check | Insights from Jason Hazeley

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Eighteen summers ago, my partner and I brought home a newborn baby from the hospital. We were all exhausted, except for our daughter who peacefully slept. As new parents, we were overcome with a sense of uncertainty and unease.

Entering our house with this tiny human for the first time, it felt as though our entire world had been transported to a different place. We knew where everything was, yet we couldn’t pinpoint our own location.

Last weekend, that same young person left home to attend university. And once again, we’re experiencing a profound emotional disconnection.

I have absolutely no idea what emotions await us. Will we shed tears? Of course, we will. We’re middle-aged and we cry at everything. Will we worry? Undoubtedly. We’re parents. But how will we worry? Will it be the same familiar worry or something entirely new, like the worry brought by the Omicron variant?

Parenthood is a continuous stream of goodbyes. The child leaves the womb, the cot, and eventually grows out of the bottle. They run off independently in parks and zoos, start nursery, and become too heavy to carry up the stairs after a long car journey.

They start walking to school alone, making their own choices in appearance and fashion. They venture out on their own during weekends, staying out late and returning home while we’re asleep. Goodbye. See ya. Bye. And we become accustomed to this carousel of farewells. But this time feels noticeably different.

There are numerous peculiarities. Adding her address to our contacts, a place that never needed to exist before because we all lived together in the same home.

I review the meticulously organized shopping list I’ve carried in my mind for years, categorized by aisle like a military operation, and notice that a quarter of it is now crossed off. But will I remember these changes in the chaos of grocery shopping? Or will I come home, place something in the fridge, and discover it weeks later, wondering why it remains untouched and expired?

I attempt to mentally adjust to this New Normal. She’s just upstairs in her room, exactly where she always was, except now she’s several hundred miles away. She’ll be back for Christmas. Christmas? It’s 29°C outside and I’m wearing shorts. Quality Street chocolates aren’t even available this time of year.

What about her younger brother? How will he cope with the void left by his sister? Will he experience psychological repercussions from this separation? A therapist once told me that sibling relationships are an unexplored realm. The two of them have always taken care of each other. Can they continue to do so through FaceTime?

We are now a three-person household. This hasn’t been the case since he was born. It feels as though we are undoing parenthood in reverse: going from no child to one, reaching a peak of two, and then back to one again. And in a few years, we’ll return to having no children. We’ll still be parents, of course, but our “children” will officially have different addresses. (By the way, why didn’t the English language bother to create a word for adult offspring? “Child” was destined to grow up eventually. Tsk.)

The day after dropping off our daughter at her student accommodation, we decided to distract ourselves by visiting an anthropological museum, where I stumbled upon a display of empty birds’ nests. Even my sense of humor found this particularly fitting. But our nest isn’t empty; it’s just missing one fledgling.

I think about the next time we’ll see each other. More time will have passed apart than ever before, and we’ll notice the inevitable signs of aging and change in each other – and we’ll notice ourselves noticing.

And then the first wave of Omicron worries floods in. Did we miss something during the 18 years we had to prepare? And is it too late now? Here we are again, life abruptly relocated to a different place. Act two. Let’s hope it lives up to the brilliance of the first.