PenPenWrites

parenting blog, memoir notes, family punchlines & more

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© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

recent posts

© Penelope Lemov and Parenting Grown Children, 2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given.

Category: empty nests

  • Empty Nest: Support for the college-dropoff blues

    My yoga teacher is a single mom. She dropped her only child off at college a few weeks ago. The daughter is a freshman and this is the first prolonged time away from home. My yoga teacher came back a day after the drop-off with bouyant tales of the move-in, the roommate, the campus. This…

  • Emptry Nests: Do we want our adult kids to live at home again?

    Emotional Misery. That's what I remember about those first few months of becoming an empty nester. After we sent our youngest child off to college, my husband and I had the blues all through that September. There was a sadness in coming home from work to a house that was too quiet–no music seeping through…

  • Observation: Jhumpa Lahiri on the hole in a parent’s heart when a son grows up and moves away

    Jhumpa Lahiri tells us how a father (the narrator of her short story "P's Parties") misses his son, a son described by the father as  "a grown man, a college graduate, a few months into his new life abroad, pursuing further studies at a foreign university." The father muses on his wife's joyful acceptance of…

  • Empty Nesting: The college dropoff blues

    The college dropoff (freshman year version in particular) is a rite of passage as tearful as sending our firstborn to kindergarten and laden with plenty of meaning. Our kids are transitioning from the cosseted safety of home to the independence of young adult life. We're transitioning from controlling parents to advisory ones. In the moment…

  • Observation: Michelle Singletary on adult children still living at home

    A few weeks ago I posted a blog about a relatively new trend: Our adult children–college graduates and/or employed adults in their 20s–have been moving back home and staying there for longer than, say, we would have at their age.  Since my children have long grown and flown, mine was an observational piece about economic…

  • Observation: On getting beyond the empty-nest blues.

    In an essay for the Washington Post's Parenting column (The graduation speech we should be giving to parents), author Mary Laura Philpott puts into perspective what lies ahead for soon-to-be empty nesters.  The exact circumstances have been different for all of us, but among my friends, we’ve experienced countless surprises after our kids reached legal…

  • The Pain of Parting: Lessons in Letting Go

    Our son sent his oldest child back to college and his oldest daughter off to Roma for a gap year of study abroad. He still has one child at home but his heart is aching. As his two eldest headed off, he managed, he tells me, not to tear up in front of them. He…

  • Observation: A dad realizes his daughter is all grown up. So does his mom.

    "And then suddenly you turn around and they are all grown up…" This is the lament I found on Facebook by a dad who posted a photo of his daughter dressed up for her high school's Senior Ball, looking sophisticated and ready to take on the world. The posting seemed to capture the moment the…

  • Re-nesting: Adult children moving back home–here and abroad

    Remember the bad old days and the effect on our grown children of the Great Recession (2008+). Remember stories about the worst old days and their effect on families during the Great Depression (1929+)? Well, the Pandemic Retrenchment (2020+) has, like those past economic disasters, brought many of our adult children home again. They're camping…

  • Re-Formed Nests: Grown kids are moving back home–a trend with a Covid accelerant.

    Ever since the pandemic descended on us in March, there's been a noticeable uptick in an ongoing trend: Our adult kids are moving in with us. For some the reason is financial: the economy crashed and with it, their jobs. For others, it's emotional: the loneliness of living alone in a small apartment under quarantine…