“How do you feel about having an empty nest?” I’ve heard this question repeatedly in the past year. I objected every time, even though our younger son was about to leave for college. “The nest won’t be empty,” I insisted. “We’ll still be there.”
The word “empty” conveys only absence: empty pockets, empty wallet, empty-headed, running on empty. “Empty” is never a good thing. Interestingly, as it turns out, birds’ nests are actually empty after the baby birds learn to fly: Nests are temporary shelters only, and avian grownups also move on once the bird-rearing is done.
It’s time to jettison the “empty nest” terminology for something better. Personally, I like “next chapter.” This reframing is not only psychologically valuable for people making sense of the next stage of their lives, but also important politically. First coined in 1914, the phrase “empty nest syndrome” became widespread decades later to describe mothers who experience depression when their children leave home. The tacitly grim message of “empty nest” continues to this day: the notion that once a person (let’s be honest, a woman) has raised her children, life is aimless and sad. It’s time to dust your kid’s empty bedroom amid abandoned stuffed animals and pop-star posters.
While the long-standing “empty nest” idiom seems benign, words affect our way of understanding the world, and the phrase overlaps with a dangerous view that’s come to light in the 2024 presidential campaign. We’ve all heard J.D. Vance’s cruel comments suggesting that people without children are not quite normal or right. Implicit in both Vance’s statements and the idea of the “empty nest” is the notion that people’s—women’s—value stems from their productivity, specifically in the form of procreation. Once that’s all done, you’re kind of pathetic until there’s a new crop of grandtots. It’s a dehumanizing outlook. Whether people are entering their next chapters, or never had children at all, there’s a world of meaning, purpose, and joy entirely separate from parenting.
Before delving into the next-chapter question, though, it’s worth noting the cultural limitations of the premise that heading to college is a sharp break. Many young adults in the United States and elsewhere live with parents through college or first jobs, and beyond. And technology allows families to stay more connected than in the past, through FaceTime, texting, and inexpensive phone calls. There’s also the trend of boomerang children and intergenerational households. When an 18- or 20-year-old moves out these days, it’s more of an evolution within a lifelong relationship, rather than a stark rupture. Our collective understanding has increasingly advanced beyond the myth of the rugged individual fallen from the coconut tree, grasping instead that we live in interconnected communities and in relation to each other.
To be sure, when children depart, it’s a real change: the end of the day-to-day pleasures and grind of childrearing. Labor activists a century ago rallied to the slogan “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.” For many parents of kids still at home, “what you will” just means your kids. It’s lovely, and also limiting.
In the next chapter, though, with more breathing room, “what you will” bursts with possibility. There’s time to focus on a thriving or stalled career, connect more deeply with a spouse or other family members, exercise, learn a language, master the guitar, knock doors for candidates, go on vacation. Time to volunteer tutoring students or welcoming a refugee family. Time to be the person who brings a casserole when someone is sick or grieving.
That kind of next chapter sounds rich and purposeful. It’s also sort of how many people without children live every day.
J.D. Vance agreed when an interviewer posited that “postmenopausal females” exist to care for grandchildren. Vance bizarrely advocated that parents should get more votes, and tarred “childless cat ladies” as uninvested in the country’s future. But the people I know without children are teachers and accountants and therapists, an optometrist and an auto mechanic. An environmentalist who’s also a devoted animal shelter volunteer, a banker who develops affordable housing. They’re aunts and uncles, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues.
It should go without saying, but: People are equally people if they can’t have kids, if they already raised their kids, if they never wanted kids, and even if they won’t change seats on the airplane because they hate the little stinkers. Human beings have intrinsic value just for existing, regardless of their relationship to the next generation.
The right wing’s bullying natalism is one more example of their compulsion to divide people between in-groups and out-groups, the goods and the bads, us versus them. They refuse to see that we’re interconnected, to imagine there might be room for everyone, to consider that there are countless beautiful ways to be and to live. It’s also one more example of the conservative longing for an imaginary yesteryear when men were men and women were women and everyone knew their place, a longing for rigid roles that are not coming back.
(Of course, for all their braying, conservatives don’t want everyone to become a parent: Many support efforts to block gay people from adopting children. And Team MAGA demonizes immigrants, who have higher birth rates than native-born Americans. It’s hard to win with this crew.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it will mean to no longer have our boys underfoot: no chaotic toddlers, early readers, awkward middle-schoolers, grumpy teens, no funny and kind young men to debrief with at the end of the day. I will miss all of it. Like many parents, I find no words to convey something as fierce and tender and infinite as my love for them. And now my babies have flown.
But my nest won’t be empty. There’s too much to be done. And there are people all over to guide me as I join the universe of people who aren’t raising children: my peers, whose children have also flown the coop; the aunties and uncles; the eternal bachelors; the postmenopausal powerhouses; and yes, most of all, those fabulous tea-drinking childless cat ladies, in all their fur-covered glory.
